Today, we’re excited to announce that foursquare is available everywhere in the world:

So this has been a pretty big week for us.   Since we launched last March, our #1 most requested feature has been “please add my city!”  After a few months of work, we thrilled to announce that we finally ripped apart the “foursquare only works in cities” model and replaced it with “foursquare everywhere” - the ability to add places and check-in anywhere in the world.

Read more on the foursquare blog.

We have a new landing page for all dev-related content: http://developer.foursquare.com. We’ve started by highlighting a few of the apps/developers on that page. Eventually, we’d love to have a directory that lists all of your work. If you have any questions or want to write in with comments directly, send a message to api@foursquare.com.

Bonus content: see the official announcement, read the official documentation.

And join the developer mailing list. It’s the best dev list. Ever. Invented.

Why is this important? Please hold. :)

harry’s bummed our picture didn’t make the cut. that would have been neat. next time.

A little less than a month ago when we announced that we raised some seed financing from USV and OATV, we alluded to some of the angel investors we also brought onboard.  We wanted to take a minute and give a shout-out to our angels and all the support they’ve given us so far.

Jack Dorsey, creator of Twitter.
Twitter has changed the way a lot of us think about things - presence, status, search.  Jack’s advice and feedback have already proven to be invaluable as we hustle to improve and grow foursquare.

Kevin Rose, founder of Digg.
A day after we launched at SXSW, Kevin tracked us down and bullied us into making a badge for Digg’s party.  Since then he’s been one of our biggest supporters and a great source of advice and product ideas.

Joshua Schachter, founder of Delicious.
Since we’ve launched, people have been describing parts of foursquare as “Delicious for places”.  We love this comparison and we’ve been thrilled to have Joshua’s feedback and insight into our product goals.

Alex Rainert, co-founder of Dodgeball.
Very few people understand the mobile/social space as well as Alex.  Since our very first iPhone build, he’s been throwing feedback and product suggestions at us.  Karen Bonna-Rainert, Alex’s wife and a good friend from Dennis’ grad school days at ITP @ NYU is also actively involved.

SV Angels LLC
The angel group founded and backed by Ron Conway.  Ron’s been a major player in seed-stage tech investments since the early days of Google.

Chad Stoller, NYC branding/advertising/interactive superstar.
You can thank Chad for the “mayor” idea - which he demanded we build so he could flaunt his loyalty to Think Coffee.  We sold out and wrote the code in exchange for two beers.  :)

Sergio Salvatore, long-time music / technology entrepreneur.
A long-time friend of Naveen’s, Sergio’s been advising our team on scaling and technical architecture issues since the early days of foursquare.

I can’t tell you how excited we are to have such a group of superstars behind the things we’re building.  Thanks again to everyone involved and to all those who have helped out along the way!

-team foursquare

[original post]

I’ll be out with my buddies Adam, Sean, Catherine, Matias, Mari, … and I’m sure a lot of others.

I’d love your support.

We’re building foursquare because this is what we love doing - building things that make it easier to meet up with friends, building things that make cities easier to use, building things that make random nights more fun. While we have a well defined idea of what direction we’re going and the big ticket items we want to build, we rely heavily on the feedback we receive from you all to help us decide what features to roll out next, what cities we should be launching, and what will make the product better, easier to use and more interesting.

And while this round of financing allows us to make foursquare our full time jobs, we wanted to talk specifically about what all our users should expect to get in return:

+ Better Reliability. This weekend was a disaster :) While we were migrating to a new database and switching domain names (did you notice we grabbed foursquare.com? :), the news of our financing leaked out and crushed us. Over the past few weeks, we’ve been quietly re-writing a lot of our server architecture in an effort to prevent crashes like this from happening in the future and to make our platform much more flexible for adding new features / game mechanics / badges, etc. The financing allowed us to bring on Harry about a month ago, and with any luck, we’ll be bringing on a fourth soon.

+ A Better Product in General. There’s a lot of things that are a little wonky with foursquare right now - the UI behind “tips” needs some love; We don’t handle chain-restaurants and duplicates very well; We have some issues with people trying to game the leaderboard. With a two person team, we’ve struggled to keep up with all of your feature suggestions and bug reports. With a few more folks all working together, you’re really going to start to see us getting things done.

+ BlackBerry app! Yes, it’s in development. :) As soon as we felt good about the financing going thru, we hired our friend Pete to start working on it. Give us another few weeks (the demo already looks really hot!)

+ More cities. Our most requested “feature” is to bring foursquare to more cities. Starting tomorrow (!!) with Vancouver we’re going to experiment with “crowdsourcing” new cities - allowing users to populate city listings instead of relying solely on third party data providers. If this works the way we think it may, the plan is to expand to cities all over the world.

+ The API. Both the Android app (which is amazing, right?) and SocialGreat were built on top of our API (currently in private beta). Soon we’ll open this for everyone to play with and we’re looking forward to seeing what people come up with.

+ Venue Outreach. Some of the most interesting things we’re seeing with foursquare are coming from venues reaching out to their customers. From free drinks to free hotel stays, we’ve been consistently surprised with how clever venues have been at co-opting foursquare as their own. With the help of our friend Tristan Walker at Stanford (@tristanwalker), we’ll be exploring more ways foursquare can work with local businesses. If this is something your cafe / coffee shop / bar / restaurant is interested in, ping us!

And that’s about it for now. Again, we can’t be any more excited about building foursquare going forward and we’re thankful for all the help and support we’ve had along the way (that includes everyone reading this!). A special thanks to everyone who’s been with us since SXSW and stuck with us thru all our scaling woes (is there a badge for that?)… and here’s to 1000 good things looking forward,

- dens / naveen / harryh

I say turn your health into a social game like Foursquare. Check in when you take your meds, go to the gym, walk to work, and eat like Michael Pollan. Tie this to your insurance premiums. In fact, I say turn life into one big game with various levels. Make the mundane fun. We’ve got the beginnings of the technology to do it. And I’m glad there are people like Dennis and Naveen who are there to show us how it’s done.

Dr. Jay Parkinson commenting on Health Populi’s “People without a connection to a primary care doctor don’t proactively manage health”

- Sylvia Plath

I went to Beijing a few years ago for work and found time on the side to do some exploring. I had a lot of trouble speaking Chinese — mainly because I don’t know Chinese. :) Beijing is a large city. It was hard to expect every cab driver to know each and every small street. Every morning I would leave my hotel and have the concierge tell the cab driver where to take me. But what to do after a long night out when it came time to come back to the hotel? Luckily for me, the hotel business cards had a small map on the back side. No matter where I ended up in the city, when it came time to go home, I would take out my card and point it at the driver. And so found my way back home.

Why do I blog this? I was recently thinking about how locators worked before we all had something digital in our hands. Sometimes, we don’t need anything fancy to find our way, just a single flat structure that says “this is home”. Timo has a good collection of locators called “Here“.