Those are actually the two use cases supported, and enhanced, by Swarm, since they both revolve around checking in. There's a new, more concise view for seeing proximate friends and a more powerful profile page for browsing your past check-ins.
The problem is that unless you live in a major metropolitan area no one you know in real life uses Foursquare. So it's really only useful to track your own check-ins and find places to go. I was always ok with ignoring the social aspect of Foursquare (Oh, hey, a guy I used to work with 7 years ago is checking in to some place, great to know).
But now the thing I use Foursquare for, checking in and finding places nearby are in 2 apps. Before it was ok if each part was good not great because having them both together was a win. But by splitting them the places nearby app is now directly competing against Yelp and Urbanspoon and others.
I'm not installing 2 apps for this, so the check-in part will likely not be done by me anymore. I might still use Foursquare proper, but only if it is better than other similar apps.
Interestingly - I'll probably go the opposite way, installing Swarm for checkins, uninstalling Foursquare and just using Yelp. Yelp is horrific for discovery , but it's still orders of magnitudes better than foursquare for my uses.
By way of comparison: I live 2hrs from the closest big city. Yelp is the only game in town for discovery, and its data is 95% complete in the food & drink category.
So was CitySearch 10-15 years ago. Yelp has been stale and their recent "zoom-and-hide" changes to their map-search has made Yelp fairly useless for discovery to me. Yelp has long needed to hire new UI & UX leadership, like years overdue.
