Android/iOS: Foursquare's Swarm 5.0, released earlier this week on iOS and Android, has a cleaner look and better venue categorisation. Most importantly, it downplays most of the social check-in app's social elements and strengthens its solo benefits. That's great news, because Swarm might be more useful if you use it alone.
iOS: Bar Roulette, the clever service that sends you and your buddies to random top-rated bars in your area, now has a dedicated app for iOS with a new premium service tier and support for Foursquare.
Foursquare is like a community of insiders. They will how to get free Wi-Fi at local spots, and they will also tip you on the things you can order off the menu at restaurants and bars.
Foursquare does not offer a way to handle your friend requests in bulk. You'll have to individually hit those Accept or Ignore buttons, which is a tedious task -- unless you use this nifty workaround.
Yesterday, FourSquare updated its service to allow your friends to check you in to places (with your permission). It's not the only social network that lets friends check you in or tag you publicly; Facebook and Instagram can also out you. Here's how to turn it all off and take the wheel yourself.
Free Wi-Fi is everywhere, but sometimes it isn't always easy to find. If you're at an establishment and don't know the Wi-Fi password, you might be able to find it in the comments on Foursquare.
Facebook is the most popular social network on the internet. It's a million things to nearly a billion people, and while Facebook does a handful of things competently, it is truly great at next to nothing.
The check-in service Foursquare launched a new connected apps feature that brings in data from a bunch of other apps directly into the Foursquare. This includes data from services ranging from the Weather Channel to the beer recommendation apps Untappd.
iOS/Android: Foursquare has updated its mobile apps with a completely new user interface, a new recommendation system, and a bunch of smaller tweaks to enhance the overall experience.
iOS: If you're travelling and need to find a wireless network that you can use to log in to your VPN and check email, pull up a car reservation or verify a hotel booking, 4sqwifi is a new iPhone app that -- as long as you're already signed up to use Foursquare -- can show you which check-in points have free Wi-Fi or Wi-Fi networks you can log in to.
Based on the premise of the TV show How I Met Your Mother, developer Mihai Parparita (he of Google Reader and Gmail user script fame) created Intersquares, a service that compares your Foursquare check-ins with any other Foursquare user to determine all the times you've been at the same place at the same time, whether you knew it or not.
One of the more annoying things with more and more services offering photo sharing is that you don't want to have to post photos to multiple services. FlickSquare is a solution to this problem if you use both Flickr and Foursquare - it automatically posts photos from your Foursquare account to Flickr.
We've previously suggested that social check-in service Foursquare can be more than just annoyingly self-involved, including its use as a self-tracker. Turns out it's seriously simple to track your wanderings, for expense sheets or other means, with Google Maps.
Free access to social networking sites has been used as a carrot to attract mobile users before, but 3's latest deal is pretty comprehensive: free access to Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, FourSquare and MySpace for contract mobile customers.
Office 2010 officially goes on sale on June 15 next week. Getting a cheap copy isn't that easy, but Sydneysiders have the chance to try and win a copy of the Home and Business edition if they can get to Martin Place next Tuesday lunchtime.
Windows/Mac/Linux (Adobe AIR): The marquee features added to social network aggregator TweetDeck are Google Buzz and Foursquare support, plus scheduled updates. What's actually useful, though, are the global filters that weed out oversharing, spam and other annoyances.
