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Tucked away in Manhattans SoHo neighborhood near New York University, Foursquares new digs make a much better home to its staff than the companys previous headquarters, which it shared with the Village Voice (and quickly grew out of ). Photo: John Francis Peters/Wired

Until now, Foursquare has been more like a Hollywood caricature of a social networking business than the real thing. It has a carousing, socially popular founder. A goofy-sounding value proposition involving badges, mayors, and check-ins. A lofty venture capital valuationand reportedly, little revenue. But the fresh redesign described to us by CEO Dennis Crowley and outlined below aims to change all that, making the check-in service attractive to a whole new class of consumers and, just as crucial, providing advertisers highly targeted access to those consumers.

If all goes as planned, Foursquare will finally do what Crowley says the startup has always wanted to do: Get past awarding badges like Player Please for obsessive check-ins and provide people with more actionable, easy-to-understand information to help them make decisions. The company says its goal is to make the real world easier to use. Rather than simply recording where you are, Foursquare wants to help you decide where to go.

Foursquare has always been of some use in making plans, if only because it shows you where your friends areright now. That lets people, as Crowleys former NYU professor Clay Shirky puts it, literally see through walls I am standing here and my friends are 55 yards in that direction.

Foursquare's new iPhone app, rolling out Thursday, makes recommendations more accessible, pictures larger, advertisements more visible, and social elements more prominent. The check-in button, at the top right of each screen, is intended to be more clickable. Images courtesy Foursquare

But Foursquare wants to go further, helping its 20 million users easily see where their friends have been, what they did, what they ate, who they were with, what it all looked like, and what it all means to someone standing on a particular corner at a particular time with a particular hankering.

It wasnt just a novelty trick of knowing where your friends are. Crowley says of Foursquares original iteration. The intent has always been to predict where people are going, what is the most interesting thing I should know on a Tuesday afternoon, in some place I have never been.

All the check-ins, all the mayorships were a way to get the data to do that.

Its like the Karate Kid, Crowley says. You think you are painting the fence, but you are really learning karate. Thats what we were doing.

Now that Crowley has accumulated extensive user data over the last three years, hes launching new features to make us of it. Those features begin rolling out for iPhone and Android users on Thursday and for BlackBerry users in a few weeks.

Read the rest here:
Social: Foursquare’s Plan For Relevance and Riches