Meet Foursquare’s new app - Swarm

Foursquare has released Swarm, a new smartphone app designed to replace the geolocation-based social aspects of the New York City start-up’s original service.

Earlier this month, Foursquare announced that it would be splitting its services into two apps: Foursquare for discovering places, and Swarm for checking in and keeping up with what your friends are up to.

The company will be going through a big change this year, and the first part of the transition involves the introduction of Swarm, which arrived on Thursday for Apple iOS and Android devices. A Windows Phone version is also slated for release later this summer.

Here are the five major features in the new app:

1. A new kind of mayorship. A few years back, Foursquare was all the rage because of its mayor feature. Users who checked into places most often were rewarded by being crowned the mayor of that location.

Swarm users will only compete for mayorships against their friends. That means places will have multiple mayors, but Foursquare hopes this will make competing for mayorships fun again.

2. Stickers, but no badges. With Swarm, Foursquare will be introducing a new feature called Stickers. When users check in, they are given the option to include a sticker with their post “to quickly express how you feel or what you’re doing,” Foursquare said.

Users will start out with a few stickers, but they’ll be able to unlock more based on the places where they check in.

But loyal users fret not: A new version of the badges feature will be introduced when the company rolls out the new version of the Foursquare app this summer.

3. Make plans. Foursquare hopes Swarm will help users make plans together, and the way it intends to do that is with a feature called, you guessed it, “plans.”

In this portion, users can publish posts visible to friends who are the same city. This could be used to ask if anyone is up for a movie or to ask if there’s anything happening that day.

4. Search your past. Foursquare is making it easy for users to look at the places where they’ve been by adding a new search feature.

With this feature, users can look up a city, a person or a type of places and Swarm will show them any relevant results.

The search feature can be found on users’ profile pages.

5. Neighborhood sharing. Perhaps the most ambitious new feature in Swarm is “Neighborhood sharing.”

By turning this feature on, your friends will be able to see when you go into the same neighborhood that they’re in. This also works in reverse. Anytime a friend turns this feature on and steps into the same neighborhood you’re in, you’ll be able to see that.

Foursquare has included this feature as part of its mission to spark meet-ups among friends, but you may want to think about whether you want this feature turned on.