Foursquare Gets Its Own Searchable Timeline With New History Page

Foursquare has tweaked its history page this morning, in order to give users a more functional, searchable version of their past check-ins. Although you could see your old check-ins before, they weren’t as accessible as they are now. The new page lets you click on a drop-down box to head back into the previous months or years (somewhat reminiscent of Facebook Timeline functionality), while sidebar boxes lets you search and filter your check-ins by location, category or who you were with at the time.

Being able to pull up search through your check-in history makes for a more compelling use case as for why you should bother checking in somewhere – especially if there’s no badge, mayorship or special to be gained by doing so. (The latter of which is proving often, sadly, to still be the case). Because now, you can remember where you went last night, after getting too drunk and blacking out.

No? Not a good example?

OK, more seriously, maybe you’d rather pull up all your favorite restaurants, so you can add them to your Foursquare lists of top local hotspots. In fact, Foursquare says that’s one of the use cases it actually has in mind – and the company says that soon, it will be further enhancing this page so you can filter by venue, add tips and create lists directly from this page.

Foursquare has been busy adding a number of ways to make its local discovery features more relevant to users who may have tired of the check-in game. For example, earlier this week, it rolled out a feature that lets you click a link on a Foursquare check-in posted on Facebook to add the venue to your to-do list. It also partnered with OpenTable (encroaching on ReserveMyCity‘s territory), so users can make reservations at over 15,000 restaurants across the U.S. Again, this was something added to the desktop website, where Foursquare’s newest features often hit first. Mobile-only users, stay tuned.