Alongside its new Android app, Foursquare recently launched an all new website design. Overdue updates to the year-old site bring a more user friendly atmosphere to the page. Both established and new users will enjoy what Foursquare has been doing in the attempt to compete with other social media sites such as Facebook and Google Buzz.

Ease of use enhancements include new toolbars to aid in navigation around Foursquare.com and find its functionality features. Making such upgrades can convince visitors to look over more of the page, and as they do, more people may sign up for its services. Using enhanced toolbars to find those services and discover what Foursquare can do for them, for example linking them into FourWhere and other maps to find things to do makes the users more likely to recommend the app to friends. Thus, an entire social circle may find one another on Foursquare and set up their meeting places and times.

New settings and a new name only logo have made the page easier to see and to navigate. The new settings include a redesigned history area where a user can categorize venues, helping him or her to decide which group of friends would enjoy a particular place and meet that group in that location. The same area of the site even allows the user to see which friends he or she checked in with in various places to enhance the possibility of meeting there again or picking someplace new to have a fun night out. On the flip side, an option in the setting page of Foursquare can be checked to allow local businesses to know that a user has checked into their venue. Once the venue receives verification it can see stats from Foursquare showing recent and frequent visitors and popular checking times to help adjust business hours. Users of the service can opt out of this feature and keep their visit private.

The signup page shows the greatest amount of upgrades. Many of these are important for getting new Foursquare users to join and to teach them how to get the best experience. Foursquare’s new signup page provides step by step instructions for ease of use, a boon in getting less experienced social networking users onto the service. Now, users can sign up and find friends on the Foursquare network by way of Twitter and Facebook Connect. They can link to conversations involving contacts on all three networks, making Foursquare a vary powerful communication tool among friends. After signing up and creating a list of friends with whom to chat, the user can then see a one page display of the other features it offers, such as downloading the mobile apps or exploring new places.

In this way, Foursquare offers many new things to users of its website. They may learn more about the service, sign up to use it, and connect with friends. The new site will help Foursquare in adding desktop computer users as well as mobile users.

In the race to make truly useful apps, every company makes a geo-spatial locator to assist users in finding places to go and things to do. Foursquare did so by combining Google Maps into its communications software in giving people reviews of places.

Sysomos, FourWhere’s developer, states right on its website that because it’s a public service, nobody needs to sign up, and it is free. They built it on public data found between Foursquare and Google Maps, only requiring the visitor to the site to use a Web browser enabled with Java Runtime to display the maps.

The app begins by using Foursquare’s comment posting system. People who have tried various restaurants, bars, store, and offices check in and post their thoughts about the venues. Then, FourWhere integrates the comments into maps so a user can search any neighborhood in any city for a new place to meet with others. Because Foursquare itself tends to cater to a more mobile crowd, this app is particularly strong on platforms such as Android and iPhone, although one can access it through a desktop computer as well before heading out.

The main downside to using FourWhere on a mobile platform, however, would be the size of the text making comments very difficult to read. Only a small portion of a map with the comments corresponding to the desired location could be viewed at a time. Thus, finding information in this way would become a slow process for popular venues or those with many comments. The other factor slowing down the information gathering process with this app is the fact that it forces a user to right-click a venue in order to integrate comments into the display rather than having a menu on the side of the screen, but users will adjust to that as well as the amount of time needed to sort through information.

To use the FourWhere app, search for the city you’ll be visiting in the upper right part of the screen and confirm the location. Then, to get the information others have checked into and posted, right-click somewhere on the map. The resulting menu provides the opportunity to let the app know whether you’d like to see all of the nearby places Foursquare users checked into, only those venues that have comments provided by the users, or to clear the map and begin again with a new city. To see what another person thinks of a particular location, mouse over its red pointer on the map, and the user who posted that comment will be highlighted along with his or her comment in the right-hand column of the screen.

In this way, users with patience and perseverance can make those traits pay off in finding places to meet friends. FourWhere, the result of combining Google Maps’ public information with Foursquare’s communication technology, gives people this opportunity to become efficient in finding places to go and things to do by checking in with new venues they might have missed.

During the past year, many mobile social networking fans have at least wanted to adopt the Foursquare app. However, in its earliest incarnation, its only availability had been for the iPhone and in the form of a web interface which was not so simple to navigate. Foursquare then called upon its development staff to design apps for other mobile platforms, which resulted in a new app for the Android.

April 2009 saw developers Joe LaPenna and Chris Brummel begin coding the app in their spare time. At first, they needed to reverse engineer the workings of the iPhone version to discover how to set up an Android app based upon it. Then, according to Mr. LaPenna, they needed to migrate the app to Android using Foursquare’s beta API. After working on the app for several months, LaPenna, Brummel, and Foursquare’s app manager, Naveen Selvadurai, completed the engineering to the point that consumers could comfortably install and use Foursquare on the Android.

Although the Foursquare for Android resembles its iPhone predecessor, the new version contains features not found there. The Android app includes, for example, integrated maps and one-click check in with friends that iPhone users do not have. These interfaces make the new variation more user friendly and social by allowing a user to see where friends are and find out what they’d like to do more quickly than users of the old version. Other than that and the unique Android look and feel to the app, it treats friends check in lists and badge displays the same as its iPhone cousin.

Foursquare could have set up its Android app to run in the background on that platform, but chose to do otherwise. Foursquare claims it gives the devices better speed and battery life since the program would not be running when the user is otherwise occupied. This does show logic based upon the company’s previous ideas, though, as those who use it generally prefer to check in manually with others in the process of seeking information about with whom to meet and where to go.

The fact of the Android version of Foursquare being open-source and in the app store now will excite those who wish to adopt it earlier than most since Android phones have gained popularity. The developers have posted user information on the Google Code Page and as documentation for first time users. The Android App can be found for free in the Android Market or downloaded from the Google Code Page to be installed by more advanced users to suit their specs. Of course, as users grab the app and give feedback to Foursquare, the company plans upgrades in the future, beginning with revisions of the app’s performance and user interface, although the developers continue working on which aspect to advance first. Thus, as Foursquare’s mobile connectivity app spreads into new territory with an Android app, more people will discover new ways of setting up meetings with friends and making socializing on the go easier.