The End of the Journey for Foursquare

It’s always sad when a service you’ve used is shutting down. Foursquare (the end) was one where I saw it coming for a long time, but that does only to some degree soften the blow. Foursquare (and later Swarm) was the service that introduced me to location-based services. My first check-in was on 2010-01-10 while exploring the city of Graz, where I had moved to a few months earlier. From then on, pretty much all the way up to 2019, I’ve used the service to keep track of all the places I visited on my trips - from conference to conference, from vacation to vacation. Even after I stopped using it directly, it was still nice to see other apps like Untappd getting their data from it. Unfortunately, the moment a lot of formerly active users stopped being on Swarm, you noticed it also in those other apps, with new and hip locations simply not being in the database anymore or not being kept up-to-date. A few days ago, I requested and received my data export from Swarm (Settings / Data &…