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The simple joy of a social network most people forgot about years ago
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Fast Company TechnologyEN
October 23, 2026

The simple joy of a social network most people forgot about years ago

Hello again and welcome back to Fast Company’s Plugged In. If you owned a smartphone a decade and an half ago and were into cool new apps, there’s a more-than-decent chance you tried one called Foursquare. The best known of a then-new breed of location-based social networks, it let you check into places you visited in the physical world, and see where your friends were checking in. One Foursquare fan quoted in an October 2009 New York Times article by Jenna Wortham called the ability to find nearby pals for spur-of-the-moment meetups “planned serendipity.” The app also included gamified elements that made it feel less like a utility than a form of entertainment, including badges and the chance to become “Mayor” of your favorite haunts. For a time, Foursquare had plenty of competition from other check-in apps, such as Gowalla, DeHood, Brightkite, and Loopt (which was cofounded by a guy named Sam Altman). Inevitably, Facebook pounced on the trend, introducing a feature called Facebook Places. However, checking in turned out to be a fad. One by one, most of the contenders faded away—except for Foursquare. But in 2014, Foursquare the company did something that struck me as an unforced error, and still does: It rebranded its classic check-in experience as Swarm, robbing it of the brand equity it had built up. The Foursquare name lived on through a separate city guide app (discontinued in 2024) and the company’s monetization activities, which increasingly focused on providing large customers with location-based data. Virtually every time I discussed Swarm with anyone, we shared our mutual confusion and regret over it no longer being called Foursquare. Over time, my own interest in Foursquare—whoops, I mean Swarm—dwindled. The last time I devoted my full attention to it was in 2019, when I interviewed Foursquare cofounder Dennis Crowley for an article about the company’s evolution over its first decade. Then I went back to ignoring the app until last month, when an ad tech company named Infillion acquired Foursquare, putting it back in the news for the first time in years. The acquisition’s terms were not disclosed. But in a Substack post this week, Crowley bemoaned the transaction, which he said didn’t involve Foursquare equity holders getting any money. Crowley—who launched a new AirPods-centric location-based app called BeeBot last year—didn’t mention Swarm. Even Infillion’s own press release touched on the app in the vaguest of terms, saying it was “considering a range of paths including open-source models, strategic partnerships, and opportunities that best support [the Swarm community].” As long as I was thinking about Swarm again, I decided to, well, check in on it. Many still-extant social networks of yore, such as MySpace and Friendster, have only the most tenuous of connections to their past incarnations. Swarm isn’t like that. While the app hasn’t gone through any dramatic expansion in functionality or ambition, Foursquare has been reasonably diligent about updating it with new features. For instance, it got a map-based Explore tab last April. Still, I was expecting Swarm to feel hollowed out. After all, market intelligence firm Sensor Tower says it has only 94,000 monthly active users, having lost an average of 38% of its users each year since 2018. That’s about how many followers I once had on Twitter. It hardly sounded like enough people to power an entire social network. Swarm’s nifty, new-ish map view reminded me that I once checked in from three foreign countries. Logging in to the app for the first time in eons, I discovered that I had almost 1,300 unanswered friend requests, largely from people I don’t actually know. I would not be shocked if almost all of them abandoned the app years ago. Obvious signs that activity has tapered off included the fact that the user-submitted tips I saw for businesses I checked into tended to date from the distant past. Users also seem to have fallen out of the habit of commenting on each other’s check-ins. Here’s what surprised me, though: Swarm may be dinky, but it hasn’t lost all its charm. People I friended years ago are still checking in every day. When I resumed doing that myself, some of them noticed. It felt like a reunion. Why have Swarm diehards stuck around all this time? My wife, who never stopped using the app, says she values having a log of where she’s been and what she’s done. I heard something similar from my friend Owen Thomas, the managing editor of the San Francisco Business Times. He’s a Swarm power user, with 82,850 check-ins as I write this. Back in the day, Owen told me, he was skeptical of Foursquare. Then he read that Digg cofounder Kevin Rose used the app to record his life story. “That spoke to me,” he says. “Rather than using Foursquare to broadcast to other people, it had an inherent usefulness to me.” He uses an app called Timehop to revisit his past check-ins. My first Foursquare check-in, from 2009. (It’s wrong about the theater having since permanently closed.) Somewhere along the way, Owen developed the habit of liking all of his 428 Swarm friends’ check-ins. “I can’t really explain why,” he says. “Except it’s become kind of an in-joke that means something like ‘Thank you for still using Swarm after all these years, and by the way, we’re both still alive, and how great is that?’” Even with Owen doling out likes with abandon, I find them to be tiny moments of humanity on an internet that’s increasingly being drained of it. Most social networks juice engagement by pelting you with content. On Swarm, there just isn’t that much going on, giving it a placid, calming effect. Foursquare recently added the ability to connect Swarm to ChatGPT and Claude, but as far as I can tell, there’s no AI slop on the platform. Unlike Instagram, it isn’t bulging with lush photos of users trying too hard to let the world know they’re living their best lives. Actually, I haven’t seen many photos of people at all. Shots of meals, retail environments, and airport terminals predominate. They’re mundane but reassuringly real. Swarm’s tagline on Twitter/X is “Remember everywhere,” hinting that it’s leaned into the life-logging aspect that my wife and Owen have embraced. With the user base having cratered, it’s no longer a reliable way to determine what your friends are up to right now. But longtime users can always turn to it to jog memories of their own activities from 5, 10, or 15 years ago. I found scrolling back to the days when I used the app a lot to be an unexpectedly emotional experience, full of reminders that life goes on. My ancient check-ins included defunct businesses I miss, such as Virgin America (my favorite airline) and Fry’s Electronics (my favorite big-box retailer). Today, Swarm informed me that it was the 15th anniversary of me checking in at a brunch place my wife and I liked at the time. Later, we were put off by its prices and the hassle of finding parking. I just learned that it closed in 2018. As much as I am enjoying reacquainting myself with Swarm, I am wary of getting too attached to it. When I asked Infillion EVP of Marketing Calynn Krieger for an update on the app’s future, she said the company is formulating plans but wants to share them internally before making a public statement. Absent more details, I take its talk of open-source models and partnerships as suggesting it may not want to shoulder full responsibility for the app forever. If my current return turns out to be a final fling, I’m okay with it. For now, both Swarm and I are still alive—and how great is that? Are you still on Swarm? I could use more friends, so add me. You’ve been reading Plugged In, Fast Company’s weekly tech newsletter from me, global technology editor Harry McCracken. If a friend or colleague forwarded this edition to you—or if you’re reading it on fastcompany.com—you can check out previous issues and sign up to get it yourself every Friday morning. I love hearing from you: Ping me at hmccracken@fastcompany.com with your feedback and ideas for future newsletters. I’m also on Bluesky, Mastodon, and Threads, and you can follow Plugged In on Flipboard. More top tech stories on Fast Company ‘You Can See Everything’ perfectly captures what a decade of post-truth has done to us The three-hour documentary about Elizabeth Holmes gives those of us exhausted by this era of unreality an avatar and champion in Nathan Fielder. Read More → Why you should worry less about big data centers and more about big data Google’s $10 million bid for Spirit Airlines’ archive underscores a larger issue: Big AI labs have the money to license or buy massive amounts of business and consumer data. Read More → The next Xbox could cost $1,800. Here’s why With Microsoft and Sony facing soaring component costs, the next generation of gaming hardware could come with unprecedented price tags. Read More → This simple tool fixes Google Calendar’s most frustrating flaw Turn messy plans into magic calendars that anyone can access—without all the usual headaches. Read More →

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This new tool layers Wikipedia articles onto a map to make your half-hour walk more interesting

How much do you really know about the world right outside your door? A trending tool has the answers, highlighting all there is to see, do, and discover within a 30-minute walk of your location. On Local Wiki, users can input their location—either directly or through a postal code, town, area, or nearby landmark—and see a color-coded map of every Wikipedia article geotagged within 30 minutes on foot. The so-called “encyclopedia for round here” includes everything from local parks to cultural hot spots and even historical events. If it has a Wikipedia entry, it will show up on the map, and thousands of social media users are already singing the site’s praises. The man behind Local Wiki Local Wiki was created by Scottish designer and writer Neil Scott, whose post sharing the project on X has garnered more than 1.4 million views in just over a day. Forget 15 minute cities, here is everything that is on Wikipedia located within a 30 minute walk of where you are:https://t.co/oRsYGmwehL— Neil Scott (@MrNeilScott) October 22, 2026 Scott tells Fast Company that his version of Local Wiki builds on a concept by his friend Ed Jefferson, who created a more traditional wiki restricted to the Wikipedia articles geotagged within 1.5 miles of a given location. “I’m a visual person, so I wanted to see where all those places sat on a map,” Scott says over email. As a self-described psychogeographer (someone who studies the connection between environments and human behavior) and flâneur (someone who walks through urban settings observing the hustle and bustle around them), Scott takes special interest in the stories of the places around him. He hopes Local Wiki might inspire others to do the same with their own neighborhoods. “The internet shouldn’t be an end in itself; it should help us explore the real world. I love the idea that this might get people outside,” he says. But for those who’d rather stay indoors, he also hopes it inspires more people to contribute to Wikipedia. Given that Local Wiki is entirely based on Wikipedia’s geotagged data, Scott says “the credit really belongs to the editors who wrote those articles.” Scott’s post about Local Wiki is his most successful to date. While most commenters lauded the tool and shared the hidden gems they discovered in their neighborhoods, others complained that there’s little to see on the Local Wiki if you don’t live in a big city. “It became a source of both pride and shame, with people telling the world how much or how little Wikipedia coverage their area has,” Scott says. “I think people also shared it because it’s so simple: a reminder of what the web is like when it isn’t trying to sell you something.”