Foursquare reveals all-new iPad experience on the web

Following in the footsteps of Fortune, Financial Times and other companies that tap modern web technologies to their advantage, Foursquare, a popular location-based social networking web site, is focusing on HTML5, too. For much of the social stuff found in the App Store, a well-written HTML5 web app can perform just as good as its native counterpart.

Foursquare’s new experience on the web doesn’t just provide the features from their native iPhone client, they also augment it with new social discovery capabilities optimized for mobile devices such as iPad and other tablets.

Point your iPad’s Safari browser at foursquare.com and log in using your credentials. You should be presented with a map that shows your friends, trending places (yellow), places on your lists (green), places with Specials (orange) and popular places (blue).

The new List discovery feature lets you search for a particular venue visually, including guiding tours of places built using crowd-sourced knowledge. The site-wide redesign includes revamped place pages, commenting, bigger photos and so forth. Another noteworthy nice-to-have: Places on the map show personalized content based on the time of day.

According to the blog post:

To make sure it’s useful every time you visit, we also pull out a few results that are perfect for what you want to do next. Load it up at 11:30 and we’ll start suggesting great lunch spots nearby, and in the early evening we’ll switch to places for dinner. On Saturday afternoon, we’ll show you some great weekend activities. We’ve been testing this at foursquare HQ for a while, and love checking it for new ideas before we go out.