Ahead of Swarm’s release next week, Foursquare freezes mayors ‘for the time being’ and drops ousting feature

Foursquare today revealed more details about the service split of its existing app and its new Swarm app. The company also revealed Swarm for Android and iOS is coming “next week” (which narrows down the timeframe slightly from the previous “coming weeks”). The biggest change is that the mayorship feature that gamified Foursquare is being cut down to a minimum and transferred over to Swarm.

Starting today, there will be no more ousting of mayors in the Foursquare app and current mayors will be frozen in place “for the time being.” The list of proud mayorships you hold will continue to be displayed on your profile, though the company wouldn’t say how long this would last before the feature is ripped out completely. Foursquare also promises all your hard-earned badges will continue to live on in the app’s trophy case.

The company says this will “make way for mayors 2.0 in Swarm.” The next version of the mayors feature is based on the same 60-day historical window, so if you’re mayor of a place where you and your friends go now, you’ll be mayor amongst your friends in the new app.

Here are the changes and features Foursquare is promising:

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• Mayors 2.0: Compete with your friends instead of the 50 million people on Foursquare. These new mayorships will be awarded with a crown sticker based on who out of your friends has been there the most lately. In other words, places can have many different mayors, one for each circle of friends, instead of just a single mayor at each place.
• Insights about your life: Tidbits that Foursquare serves up after each check-in, like “Your 4th week in a row at your gym” or “Your first time hanging out with Jason in 3 months,” will live on in Swarm.
• Stickers: These can be attached to your check-ins in Swarm to quickly express how you feel or what you’re doing. They’re all free: you get a few to start off, and you’ll get more based on the types of places you visit.
• The new Foursquare, which is “coming this summer,” will have “the spiritual successor to badges.” No further details were provided.

Last but not least, Foursquare says it has hidden “a few other surprises in the [Swarm] app” but wants its users to find those. We’ll let you know next week when Swarm launches.

Top Image Credit: Justin Sullivan/Getty Images