I missed that Foursquare was sold recently. Former CEO Dennis Crowley has a good blog post reflecting on the company:
I was heartbroken by this ending. There are so many people who put so much time and energy and passion and love into building Foursquare – the company, the products, the brand, the culture.
I’m still using Swarm. Micro.blog can import Foursquare data into your blog, but Swarm export barely works. Time to rebuild all of this on open standards.
@manton As long as you can pull place data from an API, the check-in and publishing functionality is fairly straightforward. I’ve stuck with Swarm as my front end for publishing check-ins to my blog and ATProto, though its place data can be stale. An OSM-backed, ATProto-native alternative would be great.
@manton Wait, how the fuck is it legal to suddenly declare “we’re selling the company but y’all get $0 for your stocks lol”?…
Lots of ways. If the company owes debt, debt holders get paid out before stock.
Stockholders are usually entitled to some sort of notice and vote though, so curious how that worked out.
@manton I used to absolutely love Foursquare, the gamification of things had me totally addicted. When they broke things off into Swarm and Foursquare, I started using it less. I reinstalled it last year though, not even sure why any more, and was surprised to see that it’s still being used. It’s a shame, I think they had something really awesome which has gotten lost. I’m glad that Own Your Swarm is a thing though.
@SteveSawczyn I’m glad to see OwnYourSwarm still works too! Foursquare’s API (and export) has been hit or miss. This week I’m going to try switching completely to my own blog for check-ins.