A few weeks ago I ran into Dennis Crowley in the USV offices. He whipped out his iPhone like the excited kid he still is and showed me Radar running on his phone. He was running a pre-release of iOS5 and a pre-release of the new Foursquare app. His phone alerted him, just like getting a text message, that he was at USV and he ought to check in there.
I said, “Dennis, this is the feature we’ve all been waiting for. This is what I’ve wanted Foursquare to do since the day I put it on my phone.”
There are features and then there are game changing features. Foursquare’s Radar is a game changing feature. Radar will prompt me to checkin more frequently, to use lists more actively, and to find people and places I need to know about while I’m out and about. Radar is one more bit of the big Foursquare vision being rolled out.
Here’s Foursquare’s post about Radar and another with answers to some frequently asked questions. It’s interesting to see that Radar is leveraging some new technology in iOS5 to make it work without draining the battery:
Radar uses a very battery-friendly location-finding mode that is totally new to iOS 5, the same one Apple’s own Reminders app uses.
Now, can we get Radar on Android and Blackberry please??
