Where is the 'Where I've Been' Service?

I've been a Foursquare user since day one. Actually well before day one, as I was also a Dodgeball user, before Google acquired and did nothing with the precursor product, prompting the founders to leave and start Foursquare. Anyway, what I'm saying is that I have around 20 years worth of "check in" data with the service. Nearly every place I've been for two decades.

That's both wild and useful. I can't tell you how many times over the years I've checked to find "that one place I was at once years ago". In fact, that information is the only reason I've continued to use Foursquare (and more recently, its separate check-in app, Swarm) over the past several years – basically since they merged with Factual in 2020 and became far more of a data play. Now with the news that Infillion is buying the combined company, I think I'm officially done.

Nothing against Infillion, but it's a full-on ad-tech company. Even if I was okay helping to fuel that business for them with my check-ins, I have a hard time believing they're going to focus on the consumer-facing side of the business any further. And again, the reality is that the writing has been on that particular wall for years – a couple years back, the actual Foursquare app (which became the place for recommendations and guides) were shuttered, for example.

It sucks, but it's also fine. Knowing Foursquare was a startup, I actually started automatically backing up my check-ins about a decade ago to a Google spreadsheet (thanks Ifttt!) – I just checked, that personal database is now about a dozen spreadsheets deep with thousands of places I've been saved. So I guess Google Drive search – and perhaps Gemini – will now be my best friend for such personal historical context.

But it's wild to me that since Foursquare ceded this position in the market, there's no other major player really operating here. Gowalla, Foursquare's old-school competitor, long-ago acquired by Facebook, tried to reboot after Snap bought (and shut down) Zenly. Alas, it wasn't meant to be. There was some hope that Zenly's founders were jumping back into this ring, but it's not clear what, if anything, Amo is at the moment.

Snap Maps may be the closest thing we have, but it's a social location layer, not a "places I've been" database. For that, the closest thing is probably Google Maps itself. If you have location history turned on, the product keeps track of where you've been in the background. But it's so comically buried in the Maps app that it's basically useless. (When you tap on a location, if you scroll allll the way to the bottom and tap again, there is an area for "Your visits and Maps history" – which itself is an obtuse series of toggles and generally unhelpful data that can take a while to load.)

Apple Maps also has some notion of 'visited places' they try to capture for you now. But, while prettier than Google's, it's probably even more useless.

Oddly, the best option to see where you've been these days is to check your photos! Thanks to geolocation data, you can pull this up via Apple Photos or Google Photos. The latter is a bit better for this with a nice 'Places' area only mildly buried in 'Collections', with nice heat maps of your pictures overlaid on the map. And because Google's search capabilities are better than Apple's (as you'd hope), I now routinely find it the best way to figure out where I've been!

But yes, it's a bit of a hack because these are tied to coordinates on a map, not actual locations. So you need to triangulate to get what you're actually looking for.

I know there are a handful of smaller services and startups that do some of this better – I've always thought Fog of World was a fun/great idea – but the reality is that this should probably be baked into one of the major maps apps or services. Not buried in some drawer, but front-and-center: Where I've Been.

I realize that most people don't travel as much as I do, so I'm hearing some awfully small violins here in my ear. But at the same time, I've willing to bet that every single person in the world has given recommendations of some sort to someone else about where to go, even if it's in their own hometown. Maybe they remember all those places by heart, but perhaps they don't. That one coffee shop two towns over, the park that's 40 minutes away that we went to that one time, etc. That kind of stuff. This is useful to everyone! Not necessarily for your own information, but certainly to tell someone else when they inevitably ask. Also sometimes just to remember.

And in the Age of AI, such information becomes potentially more interesting and powerful. If you can pull up the sushi spot you want to recommend to someone via a natural language query – perhaps even with only your voice – that's clearly going to be useful. So useful that it sounds like an Apple commercial for Siri, but I don't think they're doing enough on the location logging side to make this seamlessly work. Because no one was except for Foursquare, and now they're a data broker owned by an ad-tech company!

I mean I guess you could say that Google is technically an ad-tech company too. Still, they control a map that billions of people use. And so it might be worth making such functionality actually useful. Not to share with the world, like you could with Foursquare, but to share with people who ask for your recommendation on something. We should be able to have such information instantly at our fingertips now. And yet as we bury Foursquare, it's just wild how buried "Where I've Been" information is...