After using it for a few years and then on and off in the past year, I recently deleted my Foursquare account. There were a few big reasons for this decision. First off is obvious privacy concerns. Those are obvious, but my concerns with Foursquare were primarily concerned with two other things. A lot of my "online" friends are on Foursquare, which is great and helpful during conferences or other events, but on a day to day basis that does not really seem too useful. Some of my students were on it and a few co-workers, but not a substantial enough amount of people to make me want to continue using this app.

The biggest problem, however, was the fact that many local businesses did not honor "deals" offered on Foursquare. I had two franchise owners of large coffee shops ask me what Foursquare even was, and another was extremely hostile about the fact that they did not honor whatever discount was mentioned on the app. Now, with the franchises this could be a matter of the corporation doing it and franchises opting out, but then why is it still on the app? That is not a local stores fault really. Somehow, Foursquare needs to be better designed to deal with this.

I lost interest as time went on because there was little incentive to use the app. If I could get deals, I would be happy to use it. I was pretty bummed when I found out that deals I thought I was getting would not be honored. Some of my students have said the same thing. I just do not see a use in the long run for apps like this.