Remember Foursquare? The social network that popularized “checking in” has gone through various ups and downs since its launch in 2009, but there are still over 50 million monthly users. The popular mobile app used for discovering the best eating and drinking establishments anywhere in the world has mined its 2015 data to provide us a list of the top things we ate, drank, and saw throughout the year.
In its list, Foursquare notes the most popular mentions, ratings, implicit visits, and Swarm “check-ins” for each month of the year. For many, you can probably guess which events were most likely to draw us out of our homes. The day before Thanksgiving was the most popular Wednesday of the entire year for going out. Referred to as Pre-Game Wednesday, this night saw a 59-percent increase in bar visits when compared to the previous Wednesday.
There are some interesting findings, such as a 21-percent year-on-year decline in food truck visits between January 2014 and January 2015, but an increase in the popularity of “poke,” a raw-fish salad common in Hawaiian cuisine.
While Foursquare has always been a relatively popular mobile app for checking in and letting your friends and followers know where you’re hanging out, it faced some scrutiny in 2014 when it split itself into two apps — Foursquare then became Foursquare plus Swarm. The main app was intended to focus on location discovery, while the Swarm side was to manage social check-ins. As Nicole Lee noted in an Engadget article, many Foursquare users became frustrated and disappointed at the loss of “mayorships,” which allowed users to establish themselves as the mayor of locations they frequented. Although the app eventually brought back a new kind of Mayor game, users commented that it wasn’t the same, and didn’t really enjoy the thought of using two different apps for Foursquare.
However, with over 50 million active users in August, according to Venture Beat, it seems that the mobile app is still powering ahead with 2016 possibly being another big year. Also predicted to be big in 2016 according to Foursquare’s 2015 list? Latin American tastes: Mentions of Latin food staples such as cacao and coconut milk, as well as visits to Cuban, Caribbean, and Peruvian restaurants, more than doubled in 2015.
