Foursquare squeezes in events next to check-ins

When you're at a location, you're often at an event too: users can now check into concerts, movies

Foursquare announced Thursday that it is getting in the events business. That is, after a couple years of seeing users create “locations” like “U2 at the Meadowlands” and “Harry Potter at Century 21,” foursquare has actually created a feature that lets users embed certain events into a check-in.

To do this, the company has partnered with ESPN (for sports events), MovieTickets.com (for movies) and Songkick (for concerts).

Now, when a user checks into a certain place (like an arena or movie theater), foursquare might automatically suggest that the user check into an associated event as well.

For the time being, the only events available for check-ins will be those imported from the above content partners. In future versions, foursquare may let users create their own events. Through the content partners alone, however, foursquare says hundreds of thousands of events at more than 50,000 venues will be available.

Besides the check-in, events will also provide users with extra information. For example, ESPN might display relevant sports data or Songkick might offer details about the artist and concert.

Impressively, Foursquare has brought pretty significant updates to its platform every day this week.

On Monday, the Web service added a new Lists feature, whereby users can group together a bunch of locations under one theme, like “Top picks for Italian restaurants” or "Where should Alice & I go in Paris?" In the second of those two examples, the list would be collaborative, meaning any user could add locations.

The following day, foursquare updated its iPhone app to feature photos in-stream, as a means of providing additional context to check-ins. The app received a design upgrade too. And yesterday, the company announced a “round-the-clock, round-the-world” hackathon for the foursquare community, set to take place September 17-18.

This is the kind of awesomely rapid iteration and evolution we’d expect from a company that just raised $50 million led by Andreessen Horowitz. Evernote is another example.