In a significant move that marks both an end and a new beginning, Foursquare has released its massive places database as open-source data, sparking discussions about the company's evolution and its impact on the geospatial community. This transition comes amid broader changes at the company, including recent layoffs and the sunset of its City Guide app.
Recent Company Changes:
- 25% workforce reduction (105 employees)
- Discontinued Products:
- Foursquare City Guide
- Visits
- OCF
- Mobile Developers Tools
- Geode
- Current version of FSQ Insights
The Golden Era of Check-ins
Foursquare's journey began as a revolutionary social app that gamified location sharing through check-ins, mayorships, and local business engagement. The platform's early success was built on a clever community-driven approach to data curation, where users actively contributed to improving place information.
It was gamified just enough to be engaging but not so much that it would become annoying or a grind. It was tied to the real-world via restaurants and other places offering special discounts when you checked-in or became the mayor of a place.
The Pivot and Decline
The company's decision to split its app into Foursquare and Swarm marked a crucial turning point. This move, combined with increasing competition from Facebook and Yelp, led to a gradual decline in user engagement. Despite having a strong commitment to location privacy, Foursquare struggled to maintain its consumer-facing success, eventually pivoting toward enterprise solutions.
The Data Legacy
The newly released Foursquare Open Source Places dataset contains over 100 million global points of interest, representing years of accumulated location data. This release appears to serve multiple purposes - from fostering community contributions to ensuring data sustainability. Industry experts note that this move could be particularly significant given the emergence of competing initiatives like Overture Maps, which has already gathered 3.7 billion features.
Dataset Specifications:
- Total Records: ~104,000,000 places
- File Format: Parquet (Snappy compression)
- Total Size: 10.6GB
- License: Apache 2.0
- Update Frequency: Monthly
- Core Attributes: 22 fields
Looking Forward
While some view this open-source release as a strategic pivot, others see it as a sign of Foursquare winding down certain operations. The company recently laid off 25% of its workforce and is discontinuing several initiatives, including Visits, OCF, and Foursquare City Guide. However, by releasing this valuable dataset under the Apache 2.0 license, Foursquare is ensuring its legacy of location data continues to benefit the broader technology community.
The move raises interesting questions about the future of location data and whether this could lead to potential collaboration with other open-source mapping initiatives, though licensing compatibility between different projects remains a complex challenge.
Source Citations: Foursquare Open Source Places: A new foundational dataset for the geospatial community