Foursquare has been defining its app beyond the “check in” for a while now, with the addition of things like more fleshed-out personal profiles, more detailed recommendations, and the like.
Today, the company is starting a gradual roll out of a new version of the Foursquare app for Android that marks its biggest move into a “post-check-in” experience yet: A feature that will ping phones with personalized recommendations based on a user’s targeted physical location, without needing them to check in at all.
With the new Foursquare, when you walk into a cafe you’ve never visited before, it may buzz your phone to let you know that people who visit there rave about the breakfast burritos. In a bar, you might be pinged with a tip that you don’t need to put quarters in the pinball machine to use it, because it’s broken (very sneaky.) And, in line with Foursquare’s recent focus on generating revenue, you might also get a buzz on your phone about merchant promotions though Foursquare founder and CEO Dennis Crowley vows that “you won’t see a lot of that.”
It’s a new try at the same type of function provided by the the opt-in “Radar” feature that Foursquare started rolling out on iOS to less than stellar results back in 2011. In an interview this week, Dennis Crowley said that while this type of experience has always been Foursquare’s ultimate goal, Radar suffered by being a bit ahead of its time:
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