Comment by rdl | Hacker News Reader

Comment by rdl | Hacker News Reader

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In the long run, I'm a lot more likely to believe ratings which are generated passively (through one's actions) vs. through conscious effort. Humans are unreliable self-reporters, and in a lot of cases have commercial or other bias. Plus, there are lots of BS Yelp reviews, like "I am giving this place 1 star because the server looks like my ex-boyfriend who cheated on me".

On the other hand, just tracking where I check in on foursquare will be kind of boring. Office, restaurants near the office (which kind of suck, compared to places even a few blocks away), airports, etc. I hope they have some kind of interesting filtering to solve that.

What I'd really like is something built on my actual purchasing history, deeper into the venue than just presence. Knowing that I always get a double double or 4x4 at innout is a pretty valid endorsement. Knowing that whenever I go to Apple stores, I buy Applecare for the products, also useful. It's useful (blinded, statistically) to other people, and presumably could be useful from a loyalty perspective, or just for personal purchase tracking, to me. (I kind of use my Amazon purchasing history like that, now. i.e. "what printer do I have in the office, so I know what toner to buy, when I'm not at the office to check".)

A payment provider (Amex for me, or maybe Square someday) is probably in the best position to do this, actually.

We use many dozens of signals to determine venue quality, not just raw number of check-ins.

And there's definitely manual rules for offices, homes, airports, and other categories that receive disproportionate numbers of check-ins.

Awesome (the product works pretty well for me, at least in the Bay Area; not so great in Hawaii yet).

Please don't be tempted to go down the "extort small businesses" path that Yelp seems to, though.

Any chance those rules will be revealed? Or is this your secret sauce?

I heard you guys had to move offices during the hurricane to further up in midtown. Were you rolling this out during that move?

I expect we may reveal what kinds of things we take as good signals, but the exact recipe will probably remain a secret sauce. Even if we don't, most of the components are really quite obvious: what kinds things would people do if they really liked or hated your business? Those are the kinds of things we're measuring.

Yeah, our SoHo office had no power for almost all of last week. We managed to find temporary office space in Midtown to work out of.

Most of the work for venue ratings was done before the storm though. We've been testing the product internally for a few weeks now. That said, a lot of people were getting work done even from our displaced office space.

> What I'd really like is something built on my actual purchasing history, deeper into the venue than just presence

Maybe next Foursquare will launch a Pay with (four)Square competitor. I feel like they're uniquely positioned to get this type of purchasing data/history and do something useful with it. By comparison, Square has 75,000 registered merchants accepting Pay With Square [1]; LevelUp has only 3,000 merchants [2]; Foursquare has 1,000,000 merchants.

[1] http://www.nytimes.com/2012/07/19/technology/personaltech/as... [2] http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/07/12/levelup-zero-scvngr...

"I am giving this place 1 star because the server looks like my ex-boyfriend who cheated on me".

Hardest I've laughed in about a week. +1

I guess the problem is that objective information is hard to standardize in a reviewing system. Plus, I've actually been wondering whether humans would view objective statistics with more faith than human reviews - no matter how ridiculous they are.

I only really care about restaurant reviews, and on Yelp, the only way I've found it to work is to find a single reviewer who is methodical (and basically inhuman) to follow, then rely on that person's reviews.

(http://www.yelp.com/user_details?userid=kSfj8tii1tw8bH1OYmb-... is the finest reviewer ever in the Mountain View/mid-Peninsula level. 75% of all value I get out of Yelp comes from that person; the remaining 25% is knowing about hours, address, and phone number better than crappy restaurant websites.)

Almost sounds like you want something like zagat.

Zagat or Michelin with 1000x more reviewers, which is the promise of a site like Yelp or Foursquare. If a business has been around for a few years, I already probably know about it. What I want is great reviews of new businesses, or rapid re-reviews if something changes, which Zagat and Michelin are poor for.

As far as I know, payment providers generally don't have access to the itemized bill for the services or goods purchased, only the total charge, date/time, and the name of the merchant.

It depends a little on the type of purchase. And, with Square, they're providing the POS (or deep POS integration) which makes it easier to get visibility into products.

I believe credit card companies almost all get deep info when purchasing plane tickets. There may be other categories. Even just knowing main bill vs. tip (which you could easily determine from preauth vs. final amount, if restaurants preauth for the billed amount only, which I think some card associations or acquirers mandate) works as a first approximation -- if I tip 25+%, I probably liked the product or service.

There's also the "purchasing card" market, where itemized invoices (level 2 or 3) get sent to the issuer and then to the responsible party.

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