It’s always sad when a service you’ve used is shutting down. Foursquare (the end) was one where I saw it coming for a long time, but that does only to some degree soften the blow. Foursquare (and later Swarm) was the service that introduced me to location-based services. My first check-in was on 2010-01-10 while exploring the city of Graz, where I had moved to a few months earlier. From then on, pretty much all the way up to 2019, I’ve used the service to keep track of all the places I visited on my trips - from conference to conference, from vacation to vacation.
Even after I stopped using it directly, it was still nice to see other apps like Untappd getting their data from it. Unfortunately, the moment a lot of formerly active users stopped being on Swarm, you noticed it also in those other apps, with new and hip locations simply not being in the database anymore or not being kept up-to-date.
A few days ago, I requested and received my data export from Swarm (Settings / Data & Privacy / Privacy rights / Data download request). While the data format is not easy to work with right away. After a bit of transforming and extending through public datasets, it should be a useful archive, though. If I ever find the time, I will probably also try extending either geotrace or just go with something like GeoPulse and hopefully be able to integrate the dataset from Foursquare.
In the end, all that’s left is for me to thank all the folks that made Foursquare and kept it running for all these years. Without it, I’d probably have forgotten many of the amazing places I’ve got to see on my travels. I hope everyone will be able to land safely on their feet after not getting any money for their shares 😞
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Alternatively, this website also supports Webmentions. If you write a post on a blog that supports this technique, I should get notified about your link 🙂