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.

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