Foursquare opens up App gallery

Foursquare has just opened a App gallery for third party developers to add Apps developed using Foursquare API. Developers can now use this link to submit their app to the Foursquare gallery. You can select categories for your app which include “Mobile”, “Website”, “Plugins”, “Visualization”, “Games” and “Others”. You can add up to four screen shots for your App. You will get your own URL for the App on Foursquare.com like this http://foursquare.com/app/checkin_mania

Foursquare did have a app gallery page before this, but you had contact foursquare by email and attach logo/descriptions to get it on there. This was good enough when there were few Apps around, but now looks like there are around 500+ foursquare apps out there.

Foursquare is doing this right by opening up a centralized App gallery, which is very useful for users to discover the app, something that Twitter did not do and relies on third party apps like Oneforty.com to aggregate twitter apps. Foursquare is still tweaking the design of this App gallery based on user feedback according to their blog. Analytics and user ratings are something that will be useful features to add. They have a facebook like button on the App pages for people to rate.