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Foursquare City Guide

mobile app by Foursquare Labs, Inc.

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General referenceInterpretive dossier study · Crown Archives visual atlas
Record originEnglish Wikipedia
Text licenseCC BY-SA 4.0
Source revisionSep 22, 2026
Entity authorityQ62024514 ↗
Source-derived summary

Foursquare City Guide, commonly known as Foursquare, was a local search-and-discovery mobile app developed by Foursquare Labs Inc. The app provided personalized recommendations of places near a user's current location based on users' previous browsing history and check-in history.

The service was created in late 2008 by Dennis Crowley and Naveen Selvadurai and launched in 2009. Crowley had previously founded the similar project Dodgeball as his graduate thesis project in the Interactive Telecommunications Program (ITP) at New York University. Google bought Dodgeball in 2005 and shut it down in 2009, replacing it with Google Latitude. Dodgeball user interactions were based on SMS technology, rather than an application. Foursquare was similar but allowed for more features, allowing mobile device users to interact with their environment. Foursquare took advantage of new smartphones like the iPhone, which had built-in GPS to better detect a user's location.

Until late July 2014, Foursquare featured a social networking layer that enabled a user to share their location with friends, via "check in"—a user would tell the application when they were at a particular location using a mobile website, text messaging, or a device-specific application by selecting from a list of venues the application locates nearby. In May 2014, the company launched Swarm, a companion app to Foursquare City Guide, that reimagined the social networking and location-sharing aspects of the service as a separate application.

Editorial summary

Begin with the source’s own compact description: “Foursquare City Guide” is mobile app by Foursquare Labs, Inc. The dossier treats that line as a proposition to test through Foursquare, City and Guide, not as a finished interpretation.

Editorial reviewA dependable orientation record for establishing vocabulary, names and a first evidence trail. The current lead gives the account dated anchors—2008, 2009, 2005, 2014—that can be checked directly. The selected authority fields contribute no independent date. For this dossier, Foursquare, City and Guide is the immediate research focus.
Editorial analysis

Why this record matters

The phrase “mobile app by Foursquare Labs, Inc” supplies a clear boundary for inquiry. It also exposes the unanswered questions: who defined that boundary, when it became stable and which sources sit outside it.

Evidence profile

Vocabulary and entity names are the principal evidence signals here, because they determine the precision of every later search. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 22, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q62024514. None of the 1 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 2008, 2009, 2005 and 2014.

Critical limits

The absence of detail may reflect summary conventions rather than a lack of surviving documentation. The source lead contains qualifying language; that uncertainty should survive quotation, summary and reuse. Authority statements aid reconciliation but still require their own references, qualifiers and ranks to be checked.

How to read it

Use the entry as an orientation point, then follow its citations and revision history. Names, dates and institutional relationships should be checked against the original record.

Best used for
  • Subject orientation
  • Search vocabulary
  • Locating named sources
Verify next

The closest primary source, responsible institution and strongest cited specialist reference.

Three-step research path

  1. Establish the record: confirm the title “Foursquare City Guide”, its source revision and the description used here.
  2. Expand the search: follow Foursquare City Guide primary sources, Foursquare City Guide archive and Foursquare research across catalogues and specialist indexes.
  3. Test the account: compare the strongest cited source with the responsible institution’s current record and note any disagreement.

Questions for further research

  1. Which source most directly establishes the central claim about “Foursquare City Guide”?
  2. Which institution is responsible for the underlying evidence?
  3. Which cited source is closest to the event, object or claim?
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Source & attribution

This entry incorporates text from “Foursquare City Guide” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.