We have made the tough decision to sunset the City Guide app on December 15, 2024, with the web version following suit in early 2025.

I loved the OG Foursquare app. Back in the early 2010s, it was simply the best way to discover great new places, and the gamification was fun and innovative.

Its demise arguably began in 2014 with “the great unbundling”, aka the split in two separate apps: Foursquare (City Guide) and Swarm.
At the time, unbundling services into multiple app properties was all the rage, and for a company hellbent on taking on Yelp at all costs, it seemed the most natural way forward.

In order to appeal to a broader audience, all the gamified aspects were scrubbed off the main app, and the “check-in” functionality moved to Swarm. At the same time though, they removed most of the gamification (global mayorships, friends leaderboard, etc.) from Swarm too, further alienating their existing user base. Swarm was then supposed to be just another location sharing app for friends (to help us making plans together), a concept that has failed so many times I lost count.

Eventually, Swarm reintroduced global mayorships and the friends leaderboard a few years later, but it was too little too late, as most users already moved on at that point. What about Foursquare City Guide? Well, it has been in a zombie state for a while, with most of the user generated content being nearly a decade old now.

Swarm will still be there for the fools like me that still use it to check-in and keep track of new places, partly due to inertia and partly for lack of a (much) better alternative. As teased in the announcement, it might even be updated with some functionality from City Guide (a mini-rebundling?), but honestly I would not expect much more than maintenance and small quality of life updates.

Foursquare (the company) now only exists to monetize location data and analytics largely coming from usage of their API/SDKs.
Ironically, if they fully pivoted to the current business model sooner and left the core Foursquare UX untouched, instead of chasing the Yelp windmills (how are they doing now, btw?), Foursquare might still have a thriving social network, and with it, much more/better data to mine.

via foursquare.com

Imagine if you could follow an Instagram user from your Twitter account and comment on their photos without leaving your account. If Twitter and Instagram were federated services that used the same protocol, that would be possible. With a Mastodon account, you can communicate with any other compatible website, even if it is not running on Mastodon. All that is necessary is that the software support the same subset of the ActivityPub protocol that allows for creating and interacting with status updates.

Mastodon is a fascinating project. At surface level, it is similar enough to Twitter for people to consider it a valid alternative: the UI and the fundamental social constructs could not be more familiar. At the same time, you don’t need to dig too deep to encounter esoteric concepts like ActivityPub and the fediverse.

A common viewpoint is that Mastodon has failed to appeal to a broader, less tech-savvy audience so far due to its federation model, but I tend to disagree: after all we are using federated messaging systems every day and we’ll likely keep doing so until the end of time.

There was a moment when email itself was an esoteric concept and it was important to know what SMTP is in order to send a message, but we have managed to abstract all that complexity away, so I am cautiously optimistic about federated social media in the long run. Arguably the biggest challenge so far is the network effect (or lack thereof), as it’s hard to move to a new platform when all you friends are somewhere else. In that respect, feel free to follow me @maffeis@mastodon.social. Don’t be shy!

via docs.joinmastodon.org

In all of these cases, the back pressure that gives wide review any force, beyond a moral high ground, is the fact of multiple implementations. To put it another way, why would implementers listen to wide review if not for the implied threat that a particular feature will not be implemented by other engines?

So yes, I absolutely think multiple implementations are a good thing for the web. Without multiple implementations, I absolutely think that none of this positive stuff would have happened. I think we’d have a much more boring and less diverse and vibrant web platform. Proponents of a “move fast and break things” approach to the web tend to defend their approach as defending the web from the dominance of native applications. I absolutely think that situation would be worse right now if it weren’t for the pressure for wide review that multiple implementations has put on the web.

Microsoft’s release of its new, Chromium-based, Edge browser has sparked renewed concerns about the rapidly decreasing diversity of browser engines. “All browsers becoming Chrome” is problematic in many ways, but while having bigger contributors like Microsoft in the Chromium project could actually help steering the project away from its Google-centric agenda, the issues intrinsic to relying on a single implementation remain open.

via torgo.com

Modern cars work, let’s say for the sake of argument, at 98% of what’s physically possible with the current engine design. Modern buildings use just enough material to fulfill their function and stay safe under the given conditions. All planes converged to the optimal size/form/load and basically look the same. Only in software, it’s fine if a program runs at 1% or even 0.01% of the possible performance. Everybody just seems to be ok with it. People are often even proud about how much inefficient it is, as in “why should we worry, computers are fast enough”:

Software engineering shifted from craftsmanship to being an industrial process without learning any lesson from other… industries.

Now it’s easy to hate on Electron’s inefficiency or blame overengineering becoming standard practice in “modern” software development, but if we really want to tackle the issue, we should focus on changing the perception of the underlying economics that push businesses to accept the tradeoffs between performances and the ability to ship products faster. Nothing comes for free, and today’s competitive advantage is tomorrow’s technical debt.

It’s totally acceptable to build products that are “good enough”, but we should never stop challenging how good is good enough.

via tonsky.me

It’ll be some time before computational notebooks replace PDFs in scientific journals, because that would mean changing the incentive structure of science itself. Until journals require scientists to submit notebooks, and until sharing your work and your data becomes the way to earn prestige, or funding, people will likely just keep doing what they’re doing.

It is incredibly depressing that we live in a world where scientific knowledge is still shared mostly by means of PDF documents, but the title of this article is misleading at best. The future of science communication will not be built on yet another proprietary document format. On the other hand, the Web platform has all the technical capabilities needed to create any sort of “computational” papers, but it still lacks appropriate authoring tools to empower scientists to do it by themselves.
The reports of the scientific paper’s death have been (unfortunately) greatly exaggerated.

via theatlantic.com

It all happened in six months from May to December 1995. Netscape Communications Corporation had a strong presence in the young web. Its browser, Netscape Communicator, was gaining traction as a competitor to NCSA Mosaic, the first popular web browser. Netscape was founded by the very same people that took part in the development of Mosaic during the early 90s, and now, with money and independence, they had the necessary freedom to seek further ways to expand the web. And that is precisely what gave birth to JavaScript.

Nice post on the history of JavaScript, or how a scripting language that was initially designed and developed in a few weeks has become one of the most successful programming languages of all time.

via auth0.com