The Magazine

With latest foursquare update your nearby friends are back

10

By on August 9th, 2012

You spoke and foursquare listened. With the latest updates to foursquare — out simultaneously for iOS, Android and Blackberry — you can now filter your friends’ activity feed to find just the ones who are nearby. The change comes among a handful released in today’s updates.

To access the filtering options, pull down the activity feed as if you were going to refresh it. You’ll find a toggle for “All Activity” or “Nearby Friends.”

The nearby friends filter was removed when foursquare launched version 5.0 in June. At the time foursquare said their data showed that it was a little-used feature. The decision led to an outcry from regular users who’d come to rely on it for finding out what their friends were up to in town and foursquare quickly reversed tack, promising the filter would appear in a future update.

Another feature lost in version 5.0 that makes a comeback in the latest version is the ability to add “venue photos.” Visit the photo gallery on any venue page and tap the camera icon to add a general photo of the venue. They no longer need to be tied to a particular check-in.

Foursquare says they’ve “also made a ton of small tweaks and bug fixes under the hood to make things faster and more intuitive.”

iOS users will notice one other change in this version. The name in the app store is now “foursquare – a free personalized city guide in your pocket” which succinctly states foursquare’s value proposition right in the app’s title.

What do you think of the updates?

UPDATE: Foursquare says the update is coming soon to Android.

  • Graham

    Yes! I just reinstalled the app and it seems that they fixed the biggest bug that had made the app all but unusable for the past two months: stability. I’m still getting the “cannot connect to the internet” message, but not as consistently as before. I’m also able to see my previous check ins, which I hadn’t realized how much I relied on until it was gone. I never really used the worldwide/near feature on the app previously. However, since they’ve turned the activity feed into a laundry list of EVERYTHING friends and brand pages had done, it seems like a good stop-gap measure to clean up the information. In the long run, I hope foursquare would consider other filtering options in the activity feed. I actually liked seeing what my non-local friends were up to, I just didn’t like seeing it mucked up with updates like “Brand X wrote 45 tips!” or “Bob became friends with Susan!”

    • Graham

      Addendum: Never mind. The bugs are back, even after reinstalling and rebooting my phone (iPhone 4s). My check-in history disappeared, the app crashed twice this morning while I was trying to find a coffee shop nearby, and now the leaderboard only shows a handful of my friends rather than the usual list.

  • http://Foursquare.com/collsully Colleen Sullivan

    Just updated the app on my iPhone, and it won’t load!! Ahh! I’ve tried everything, restarting won’t even work!

  • http://walterelly.com Walter Elly

    Love it- especially the tweak they did to commenting by moving the post button out of the keyboard. I hope in a future release they tackle todos a bit more- right now I find it almost impossible to mark that I did something. I know the scenario for how I get the opportunity to mark I did something, but prior to 5 it was much simpler/straight-forward. I expect that there are probably more than a few OCD completionist types who are losing their mind over the current implementation :) .

  • http://www.almediapage.info/ Tom Servo

    Hum. The Android version was updated with the last week, but the only feature we got was spam “updates” from local businesses.

  • http://www.twitter.com/superben Benedict N. Corpuz

    I love how the screen grab shows how I remember where I parked. 5th floor, 3rd row. Haha.

  • Caleb Hays

    I miss having access to a worldwide map showing ALL my friends’ check-ins!

  • 5square

    This update seems just as unstable as all the rest. I see the new feature, but if I cant check in, and my friends cant check in, Im not sure what it matters if they are near by or far away.

  • http://www.pottblog.de/ Jens

    Unfortunately the new update brings some bugs. The major ones are:

    - no mayor/badge splash screen (like described here)
    - the ranking list is somehow crappy (I see now only the position #3, #4, #85, #141 and so on – but not from #1 up to the last position)

    • Chris Thompson

      I’ve noticed that the mayor/badge splash is gone, but I haven’t seen any of the leaderboard issues you and other people are reporting. Must be an intermittent type of thing.

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