Foursquare

I started using Foursquare in 2012.

I was pretty diligent at checking in at places I wanted to remember, I didn’t do the thing where I checked in at every single stop or place of interest.

I was the Mayor of the club The Egg in London for a while in 2010 or so.

Which says a lot about my going out habits at the time…

I had lists for every major city I traveled to.

I worked with a lot of people who traveled a bunch for work as well, and I worked a lot of customer facing jobs which were high travel, even to the states.

But slowly, over time, people dropped off.

Except for me.

I used Foursquare well past its sell-by date.

I was a Hiroo Onoda, still checking into cafés and leaving tips well into the 2020’s while the rest of the world had moved on.

The Foursquare City Guide mobile app was officially sunset on December 15, 2024, and the web version followed on April 28, 2025.

Years of accumulated travel knowledge, all sitting in Foursquare.

I wonder if that data still exists somewhere…

Could I export it? Is there an API that still works?

A GDPR data request that would give me a JSON dump of every check-in and tip I ever left?

I think technically the Swarm part still exists, so maybe it’s in there somewhere.

But… even if I could get it all back…

Half those places have probably closed.

Lockdown probably wiped out half the places.

There’s something melancholy about a recommendation engine full of dead restaurants…