Foursquare buttons up the Web, lets you save places for offline discovery

Location-based startup Foursquare has released new features to help make the places you read about on the Web more easily discoverable when you’re out-and-about, wandering the world.

New York-based Foursquare is fast-approaching its third birthday and has been transitioning out of the terrible twos by reminding users that it’s more than just a check-in-and-forget-it location-based app. To that end, the company has revamped its website, introduced a slew of new expertise badges and added a feature to its iPhone application that alerts users about cool things to do.

Today, Foursquare rolled out three new buttons: a “Save to Foursquare” button you’ll find next to places on partner sites, a “Save” bookmarklet you can add to your browser to click and save a place to your to-do list, and a “Follow on Foursquare” button that brands can use to promote their Foursquare presence.

The “Save to Foursquare” buttons can already be found on launch partner sites including Frommer’s Travel, Eater.com, Time Out NY, Time Out Boston, Time Out Chicago, Time Out NY Kids, New York Magazine, CBS Local Digital Media and AskMen.com.

The idea is to help publishers and brands mobilize their location-related Web content, and to get you acting on your “Ooh, I want to go there” impulses by saving places to to-do lists, which are omni-accessible and may actually encourage you to follow through on those fleeting thoughts. The buttons are available to any publisher wishing to give its location-specific content more mobile life.

“Foursquare’s goal is to make the world around you easier to explore. One of the ways we do this is by surfacing rich content from publishers, brands, and the foursquare community to people when it’s most relevant,” Foursquare’s director of media partnerships Jonathan Crowley told VentureBeat. “This launch will make it easier for publishers and brands to share their wealth of place-related information, and easier for our users to save that content and carry it with them when they’re out in the real world.”

If this sounds a bit familiar that’s because Foursquare began buttoning up the Web more than a year ago with “Add to Foursquare” buttons that never seemed to live up their promise, and didn’t quite bridge the gap between Web discovery and offline activity in the way the company had intended.

This time around the startup is pushing the save-to-discover mantra home a bit more. The “Add to Foursquare” button is said to be much easier for publishers to implement. The new bookmarklet also supports the cause by making saving places more end user-friendly.

Ulimately, Foursquare hopes you’ll click-click-click your way to replete to-do lists and, theoretically, enjoy a more fulfilling existence when you step away from your computer.