The folks at Foursquare have been busy lately. The company announced recently that it’s processing over 2 million daily checkins and adding over 25,000 new users each and every day.
On stage at Le Web this week, CEO Dennis Crowley said the company has grown to 40 employees this year — a significant increase over the four they employed this time last year. The company now has over five million users in total, which Crowley revealed was split up geographically between 60% US and 40% international — with the average Foursquare user checking in 3-4 times per day.
Some significant changes are in the works for Foursquare’s core applications as well, as it was revealed inadvertently that the company is testing its long-anticipated photo sharing capability. Foursquare has long hinted that such a feature was in the works, though it’s never been formally confirmed. It’s probably safe to say that the next round of updates to its mobile apps will include the ability to take and attach photos to venues.
Speaking of the company’s mobile apps, Foursquare finally made its completely revamped API publicly available to developers today, which is aptly named “APIv2.” With it, Foursquare has dropped support for XML to make its server more responsive, while updating to OAuth2 to make it easier and more secure for users connecting to Foursquare through third-party services. In addition, the company has added the much-requested new endpoints for fetching user badges, venue histories, and venue popularity.
“The foursquare APIv2 gives you access to all of the data used by the Foursquare mobile applications, and in some cases, even more,” the company explained in a statement. “Integrate checking in or viewing checkins into your application, build tools to help users use or visualize their own history, experiment with new ways of displaying badges, leverage our uniquely rich information about venues or do things we haven’t even thought of yet.”
Foursquare is still the unofficial king of LBS checkin apps, and with these changes and more on the horizon, it’s likely they’ll hold on to the crown well into next year and beyond. Though 2011 will be an interesting year in terms of LBS applications and services, Foursquare has made a name for itself early in the game, and users are responding in droves.
