Not content to stop at just adding new badges, Foursquare continues to roll out updates. This time, they've cleaned up their website with what they themselves called "a little nip and tuck."
The emphasis of the update centers on friend management. The home page now features a Twitter-style stream of your friends' recent checkins and accomplishments. There's also a big "Find Friends" button at the top of the page.
This "Find Friends" feature is perhaps the biggest update to the website, and the most needed. This feature allows you to pull contacts from Gmail, Facebook and Twitter to add as Foursquare friends. Location-based networks like this are much more fun with more friends and a larger network, so streamlining the process of adding friends should bolster users' networks and foster more frequent use.
Managing your network is also a lot easier on the website now, because you can see which friends you have in common with other friends or potential friends. This alleviates the hesitation of adding Foursquare friends you don't know at all.
This is a good move by Foursquare because before this, there hasn't been much use for the website with so much focus on its mobile utility. Also, a more popular website opens up more monetization and advertising options should Foursquare choose to go down that road.
So although these updates are in their early stages, the overall opinion of this little location-based facelift seems to be very positive. Hopefully, this streamlined and improved friend management platform will give the Foursquare website a much-needed identity and purpose.
