With A Nice Website Update, Foursquare Did Just Get More Fun With Friends

Foursquare has always been one of those apps that was mobile-first, with the website existing as an after-thought. Sure, they’ve made their website significantly nicer over the past year, but the mobile apps are still the key. But a few updates today make the website a significantly better place to find your friends both in terms of location and on the services itself.

With a post entitled “A little nip and tuck“, Foursquare outlines some of the changes they’ve made to the site. The most noticeable difference is on the main page when you’re logged in. This page has always been fairly useless, but now you can see a stream of your friends’ most recent check-ins. But it’s the area along the top that is even more powerful.

The Foursquare girl logo has a speech bubble that reads, “It’s more fun with friends!” Below that you’ll see some of your Facebook friends who also use Foursquare. And if you click on the big green “Find Friends” button you’ll go to a page that lets you find your friends on Foursquare via Gmail, Twitter, Facebook, or email invite. These tools are now significantly better for both adding and managing your friends.

The Manage Friends area now shows you your Friends in common (along with their avatar) so you can see if you actually know a person that has requested to follow you. I’ve just added about 20 people I didn’t even realize were on the service and/or had requested to be my friend thanks to this. It took maybe 5 minutes.

All of a sudden, Foursquare’s website has utility: as a social connections manager. Now if they would just enable check-ins via the website…