A Facebook Product Guy Says Foursquare Has 'Failed At Everything It Was Once Good At'

David Weekly, a product manager at Facebook, joined Foursquare early and has checked in more than 3,000 times. Now he's quitting Foursquare altogether because the flagship Foursquare feature he loved - check-ins - has become difficult to use.

Weekly wrote a "breakup letter" to Foursquare on Medium after the company split its app in two. In May, Foursquare launched Swarm, which would exclusively house check-ins, and today it announced a redesigned Foursquare, which is a location recommendation tool like Yelp.

The problem is that Foursquare's future and business model relies in perfecting the Yelp-like business and monetizing via location-based ads; its past is in gamification via badges and check-ins. So while Foursquare has spent the past few months relaunching its main app, it quickly pushed out Swarm seemingly without a lot of attention to detail.

Weekly complains that Swarm crashes all the time and as a result, Foursquare has "failed at everything it was once good at."

"You doubted yourself in your middle age...forcing me to install a whole new app just to check in. That would be fine if Swarm had been brilliantly conceived, svelte in aesthetic and incredibly robust," writes Weekly. "But then Swarm sucked. It crashed. All. The. Time."

Weekly thinks Foursquare tried to copy what Facebook did when it launched its messaging app, but Foursquare failed because it rolled out Swarm too quickly.

"It wasn't until version three(!) of our app and a pretty complete rewrite that we felt comfortable pushing people over to [a new messaging app], because we *knew* it was going to be a better experience than messaging in the full Facebook app, and could measure it," Weekly writes of Facebook's methodology.

"So after 3,044 check-ins and 68 badges, your user #11471 is throwing in the towel."