After split­ting its busi­ness and user expe­ri­ence in two ear­li­er this year, Foursquare social media star has revealed its rad­i­cal­ly redesigned new app.

Split­ting in two

Social media man­agers who’ve been fol­low­ing the NY startup’s meta­mor­pho­sis this year will know that it launched Swarm back in May: this is now the home of Foursquare’s check in and it lets you find which of your bud­dies are near­by so you can link up for a Star­bucks, or what­ev­er else takes your mutu­al fan­cies. Now comes Foursquare 8.0, which has final­ly come out of pur­dah (it’ll be avail­able with­in the next few weeks).

Our atten­tive social media man­ag­er will instant­ly spot that the company’s trade­mark green has gone, to be replaced with water­mel­on pink. And that rather cud­dly, bounc­ing ball-type logo has also been retired in favor of a strik­ing flag icon in the shape of the let­ter “F”.

CEO Den­nis Crow­ley told The Verge jour­nal­ist Ellis Ham­burg­er that the new redesign brings to life the app he always want­ed to build. The deci­sion to split the com­pa­ny and place the check-in func­tion with swarm, he con­ced­ed, gen­er­at­ed con­tro­ver­sy and dis­sent from some. But user feed­back has been pre­dom­i­nant­ly pos­i­tive, Crow­ley main­tains, with peo­ple claim­ing they’d nev­er real­ized they could use the app to search for places.

Super­pow­ers

All the parts of the new app that have been cus­tomized for each indi­vid­ual cus­tomer (e.g., favorite food and where you can get it near­by) are now accen­tu­at­ed in pink, putting per­son­al­iza­tion front and cen­ter. The uber-con­tex­tu­al rec­om­men­da­tions capa­bil­i­ties of the app are described by Crow­ley as “super­pow­ers” that “help you see through walls to find the best places instant­ly in a city across the world.” Which is why that blocky F logo was cho­sen: you could imag­ine it embla­zoned across the chest of a new superhero’s outfit.

Over the com­ing few weeks, the com­pa­ny plans to com­plete its task of push­ing all its users to Swarm before per­ma­nent­ly remov­ing the check-in from the Foursquare app itself. Basi­cal­ly, Swarm will help you choose who you’d like to share your gen­er­al loca­tion with, while Foursquare will allow you to fol­low the tastemak­ers and peo­ple you rate highly.

And that unique “Pil­grim” loca­tion engine in Swarm can pin­point your where­abouts bet­ter than any oth­er app out there. A super­pow­er, I guess.