Swarm 2.0

Foursquare is a service that you’re probably already familiar with, allowing you to check into places you visit, to discover locations that you’ll love, and others over which you might get mad at your friends for recommending. The company’s efforts towards building a crossover between the original check in service and a social network, Swarm, brings a few new elements to the table.

As mentioned, Swarm is a nice app that can be quite useful to  have around, especially if you’re already familiar with the whole checking in process and if sharing your location with the online world is something that you often do. If that’s not your thing, then you’re probably looking in the wrong spot by using this app.

Check in

The app comes with a nice, colorful interface. You can log in by using your phone number or a social media account. As soon as you’re in, you’ll go through a rather simple tutorial, telling you what the app is about.

Basically, you’ll be able to check in to share your location with friends, which will, in turn, help you remember the daily adventures you were on. Of course, for this, the app will need permission to use your phone’s location, even when it’s running in the background. The upside of this is that if any of your friends are nearby, the app will spot them.

Now, for the social aspect of the app, the tool lets you send people quick messages. Even if your buddies don’t use Swarm, you’ll still be able to message them and arrange an impromptu get together. The messaging system allows you to share maps with your friends, photos, as well as the usual text.

The creep element

The app can look through your contact list, Facebook friends and Twitter follow list to figure out which friends are close by. When it detects someone, you’ll get to see just how close there are by the changing color of their icon. For instance, those who are only a few meters away from you will appear in a strong orange, while those dozens of miles away will appear in a faded yellow.

Swarm will keep track of the locations you check into and even divide them all into categories for your leaderboard.

All in all, this is a nice app, although the fact that it alerts you when people you know are nearby comes with a certain degree of creepiness. 

Portable version:

• Swarm for Android