Foursquare has introduced several new features ahead of South by Southwest this year. One of the most exciting new features they have added is recommendations. This Gigaom article describes the new recommendation feature as follows:

The recommendations factor in a bunch of signals, from the places a user and their friends visit and favorite, to the categories and types of places they frequent. Interestingly, Foursquare said it will also tailor suggestions based on the day of the week or time of day.

This has a lot of potential to expand by the user by leveraging Foursquare’s network effect. Much like Amazon’s “things you would like” or Pandora – Foursquare will now tell you places you might find interesting based on your previous check-in history and the activity of your friends. This turns Foursquare into an engine for driving you to new places and helping you discover new things that are already aligned with your interest.

The more people use Foursquare, the more it gets to know them and their friends, the better it becomes and making spot on recommendations, further reinforcing it’s use. This powerful network effect could really help increase user adoption and spread mainstream use of Foursquare as a location based service.

Another exciting feature, and more specifically geared towards location based marketers, are the expanded loyalty features for businesses. Gigoam explains these new features:

Now the site is expanding its specials deals for mayors to more sets of people, enabling merchants to engage with customers in a lot more ways. Merchants can now extend specials to swarms, groups of friends, regular visitors, new customers, mayors or to everyone. This is an important element because it gives people some tangible benefits of participating. Points and mayorships only work for more motivated users but deals are always attractive.

This is a great step forward for Foursquare and really cements in a lot of the location based marketing functionality. Foursquare is adopting a ton of new functionality that can let businesses target their ads and check-in specials more specifically. While some of this was previously do-able with Foursquare, having the functionality native to the platform will make it that much easier for small businesses to start adopting location based marketing.

Once small businesses and customers both start reaping these benefits and using them more frequently, this will also increase user adoption and lead to much more widespread use of location based marketing.

Foursquare has added some great new functionality to their app and this bodes very well for the future of location based marketing.