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Swarm, Foursquare’s new pivot is finally on both the Apple Store and Google Play. A few weeks ago, Dennis Crowley, CEO and Co-Founder, had announced the move to split the main app, Foursquare, in two different platforms. The first is Swarm, a social location-based application that monitors where you and your friends are. The second will be Foursquare, but in an exploring mode, with the aim to offer you a better life experience.
I have been using Swarm in the past few days and since then the only remarkable thing I have noticed is the name and the design. What I have seen has scared me and probably the investors, who have fuelled Foursquare with million of dollars. Swarm is close to what Highlight does, with the only difference that they have a larger team and more experience in terms of geo-location.
As soon as you signup, you can decide to start sharing your location with your friends (those you had on Foursquare) and see where they are. If they are in your city, you should be able to see them in a given radius. The app supports five different “location options”, Right Here (150 meters), A Short Walk Away (1.5 km), Nearby (10km), In the Area (40km) and Far Far Away. When you open the app you can see your friends filtered in these five sections.
If you click on their picture, you have the possibility to chat with them on Facebook, call them or send an sms. Further, in a secondary section, next to the friends one, you can see what they are actually doing. Yes, you can still change your location, with something very similar to a checkin, add pictures, text and smile to your current position. Further, you can also create a “plan”, which is going to be visible to friends in your city.
The aim is to propose something like an happy hour or a cinema and try to get your friends involved. It looks like a geo-location based forum, where people discuss about what they want or don’t want to do. The app is really simple and has a few functionalities, nothing more. In my case, where I don’t have many people on Foursquare, I can only see that one of them is “Far Far Away”; a first reason why I am not going to use this app.
However, I don’t think user acquisition is a huge problem for Foursquare, that was able to grow their database up to 20 million people. What I don’t see is the innovation of a team that has been working on location for years. If you decide to Pivot, you are doing it for a main reason, your product doesn’t work. True, Foursquare wasn’t even making any sense; but what they are trying to market now is something that no one is going to use.
If Highlight is failing, Swarm won’t even take off. Since Facebook has implemented the nearby functionality, there is no market for those apps that want to show you the people who surround you. What I see is not a product, but a feature, that large social networks, such as Facebook and even Google Plus, can easily integrate, by using the database they already have and the interactions.
I feel deeply sorry to see this and to give virtual “shit” to people who have spent months on a product and received millions in funding, but Swarm is really missing the point and imitating what others have already tried with a different name. Now, the challenge is to see how the new Foursquare will look like and how Dennis Crowley will market it. This is not the end, but it’s just the beginning of a different journey.
The only things they have to keep in mind is money, which is probably running out, and the difference between a product and a feature, a concept that seems to have been missing since day one.
