Dear Foursquare Superuser,

We hope this email finds you well, it is great for Vikram and I to connect directly with you. We recognize it has been some time since Foursquare last reached out formally, and we want to begin by expressing our deepest gratitude for your unwavering dedication to Foursquare over the years.

When Foursquare launched in 2009, it revolutionized how people discovered and shared places around them. At the heart of this revolution was our Superuser community – dedicated individuals like yourself who have tirelessly maintained and enhanced our Places database, ensuring its accuracy and reliability. Your contributions have been instrumental in making Foursquare’s location data some of the most trusted in the world. What has been particularly meaningful is your continued commitment to our platform even as the consumer landscape evolved and Foursquare’s apps underwent significant changes. Your dedication to maintaining the quality and integrity of our Places data never wavered, and for that, we are profoundly grateful.

Today, we’re excited to share our plans for reinvigorating our relationship with this invaluable community and expanding the impact of your contributions:

1. Opening up Places Data

As we announced earlier, we are taking a bold step forward by open-sourcing our Places dataset. This decision means that the years of careful curation and maintenance by the Superuser community will now have an even broader impact, helping developers, businesses, and communities worldwide build better location-based experiences. To support this initiative, we are investing significantly in new tools to enhance your ability to maintain and improve the Places data. In early December, we will launch a completely redesigned Superuser portal, featuring improved interfaces and more efficient workflows for curating real world data.

2. Simplifying our Consumer Products

We believe the magic of Foursquare has always been in using technology to discover, catalog and share your real world experiences through social connection. After years of underinvestment in our consumer experiences, we started from first principles to consider how to better serve the unmet need in today’s app landscape. At its core, the Swarm app user experience embodies many of the principles of place discovery and life logging that we believe are the foundation of a great consumer experience. This led us to our decision to retire the City Guide app and fully invest in a newly reimagined Swarm to serve the needs of our consumer users. Very soon, we will be inviting all of you to access our redesigned Swarm Beta. Your insights and feedback will be crucial in shaping the app’s future direction and ensuring we build an experience that truly serves the user’s needs.

3. Growing the Community and Deepening Our Engagement

We believe the results of opening the Place data and reinvesting in a world class consumer app experience will revitalize the growth of our Place contribution community. With that in mind, we are committed to strengthening our collaboration with your community through our existing channels to help shape the future of Places data. Your expertise and understanding of local spaces will be even more essential as we evolve our platform to meet emerging needs in an increasingly location-centric digital world.

4. A New Identity: Placemakers

As we embark on this new chapter, we’re introducing a new designation that better reflects the true role and impact of this powerful community. The term “Superuser” will evolve to “Placemaker,” recognizing your position as the guardians and curators of our open Places dataset. This isn’t just a name change – it’s an acknowledgment of your crucial role in shaping how people understand and interact with physical spaces in our digital world.

Why Now?

The decision to open-source our Places data comes at a crucial moment in the evolution of location-based services. As artificial intelligence, augmented reality, and other emerging technologies transform how people interact with physical spaces, the need for accurate, well-maintained location data has never been greater. By making a core subset of our Places data freely available, we’re positioning it to become the foundation for countless innovations in how people discover, experience, and interact with the world around them. Your role as Placemakers will be central to this vision. As the stewards of this data, you’ll be helping to power not just Foursquare’s applications, but potentially thousands of services and applications that will shape how people experience places in the future.

We recognize that this message comes after a period of limited engagement, and we are committed to changing that. In the coming weeks, you’ll receive more detailed information about the new Placemaker portal and other initiatives we have planned. This communication is a first step towards reinvigorating our relationship with the community and we are very excited to collaborate with you on our future.

Thank you for your continued dedication to Foursquare and our mission. We’re excited to begin this new chapter with you and to see the impact we can create together.

Best regards,

Gary Little (CEO, Foursquare) & Vikram Gundeti (CTO, Foursquare)