Instagram Dropping Foursquare for Facebook Places | Hacker News Reader

Instagram Dropping Foursquare for Facebook Places

williamlindner.com

47 pointswlindner40 comments

The immediate result: a diminished user experience. Strategy tax in full effect.

No wonder I was not able to find newly opened restaurants and some local spots which were available before the auto-update.

Facebook doesn't seem to measure for quality, they just seem to measure for quantity..

FWIW, Foursquare data in Europe is not very good, I think FB geo data is better. I've mentioned this before on HN, Foursquare in Europe is quite unreliable, with places appearing way off the real location, badly categorised (e.g. a restaurant categorised as a bar), etc. I guess quality on these services depends where you are.

I am curious how this can be possible?

Does FB and Foursquare utilise broadly similar geo-location technology from within the mobile device?

Not saying you are incorrect - just wondering if a technical expert could elaborate on the accuracy.

They buy different starting data sets.

I guess most services also use things like the free GNIS data set from the U.S. government (it has good coverage, but the geocoding is not amazing).

Edit: And an entity like GNIS actually has less resources than Foursquare gets with its army of users (or at least, a lot less feedback generation).

Probably more of a human thing than technical. The accuracy benefits from crowd-sourcing and Foursquare is used relatively significantly more in the US.

Don't worry. Facebook will never do something like this to the Oculus Rift.

Love this quote!

But seriously, who didn't think this was going to happen?

I hold out hope every time someone claims such BS, I like trying to be optimistic.

I don't really -expect- them to follow through tho. :/

Only in the US. And Places will get better faster. Not a bad strategy.

I'd be interested in the views of people that aren't in the US, and especially not in Western countries. Foursquare's database is great in the US, but when I've traveled I've found it to be nowhere near as good - I wonder if - in those cases - Facebook Places is better.

It's pretty good here in London. It's very rare for me to find a place that doesn't already exist in their Database.

Seems like a no-brainer. Facebook owning Instagram means this is just Facebook ditching a competitor's product for their own.

After Facebook acquired Instagram they were really clear that they wanted them to stay independent. I wonder how "independently" they made this decision to switch to Facebook Places instead of Foursquare. Instagram ads are most likely just Facebook's new ad platform. Facebook just removed their Camera app from the app store (http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2457866,00.asp) because Instagram IS their Camera app.

> "After Facebook acquired Instagram they were really clear that they wanted them to stay independent."

Snort. Giggle. Boy have I heard that one before. Everyone says that about every acquisition that isn't an acquihire. Hell, a lot of the time they even mean it.

I have yet to see a single acquisition that promised independence and autonomy actually maintain it for an extended period of time (say, multiple years).

I can't think of any recent acquisitions where the same type of lies weren't uttered.

"We're so happy to be joining Billion Corp. We feel that they will let us stay independent and stick to our goals. We will continue to provide the same awesome experience you all came to know and love before we sold out."

"We're so happy to be acquiring talent instead of finding it. We will totally not, not make their project theirs instead of ours, depending on our lawyers, and our shareholders. Frankly, we're just glad we didn't have to actually spend time building a good product and hiring people like these folks, since they would've never joined us in the first place."

It's certainly a tough line. You can say you want to be independent, but if one service charges $$$$ and another charges $0, it's hard to pick the pricey one.

I don't see this as a sign of lack of independence or evidence of lying. There are very good reasons for anyone to use Facebook places even if the US data is momentarily inferior. These sentiments strike me as unwarranted "gotcha" attempts that have little value.

Tbh, if it was done outside the US/Canada, I'd say it could have been an independent decision. As others have said, outside of NA, all I hear is people complaining about the quality of Foursquare's data. ;)

That said...is anyone who actually thought about it really that surprised?

They are almost always being deceptive when they make claims of "independence", "nothing will change", etc. The truth is, most companies choose to maximize shareholder value/profits over other ethical constraints because C-level compensation is chained to the shareholder's interests as best as can be managed in most companies.

It would have been nice if Facebook was more like Buffer [e.g. Transparent, Honest], but does anyone ever really seeing a company like Buffer growing to even 5% of Facebook's current Market Cap [150 Billion]?

Deception works at scale. Politics have proved that quite well, unfortunately.

And is a great illustration of the potential downsides of highly vertical tech companies.

Not really. They could just as easily have switched from Foursquare to a different third-party location provider.

They seem to be following the same course with Moves, the fitness tracking app they acquired recently.

You used to be able to tag locations with foursquare data, that feature was removed in the latest update. I assume facebook places will be replacing them.

WhatsApp uses Foursquare too (https://developer.foursquare.com/showcase/) so, I guess that will use Facebook Places as well.

Facebook dropping Foursquare for Facebook Places

Bingo.

I'm not a deep user of Instagram, but I'm wondering if Facebook's places database is better (more meta data, better accuracy, more user feedback, etc) than Foresquare's location information?

No, they are not.

Foursquare has well-curated data that's easy for users to edit and update. Duplicates are removed quickly, closed or moved places are updated almost instantly. It's an excellent gamified system for building accurate location data.

Facebook, on the other hand, allows you to attach a freeform place to anything (photo, event, review, whatever). These freeform places are not managed well. In a cursory search for a common park in my city, there were 12 duplicates and 8-10 irrelevant only slightly related places returned. The correct place was at the top, but a duplicate was in the top 10.

It could be an Apple Maps situation. Bad now, but likely will get better as people use it more.

So, this seems like a big deal, but really it just means when you go to tag a place in your post ... the place won't be there and you'll skip the location tag on your post.

If anything, it'll improve Facebook Places because people will enter more venues, as I'd imagine more people tag locations in instagram than use Facebook's social checkin feature.

I'd like to see some data, but at least in my country Facebook has vastly more location data than Foursquare.

As many have said, Facebooks' data is not necessarily very good (especially lots of duplicates).

calinet6 said it best:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7743917

I do agree that this move will probably contribute better data to Facebook Places.

"Instagram Just Geotagged Us To Hell: When Politics Drive Product Decisions, We All Lose"

https://medium.com/five-hundred-words/dad4c3736409

Hopefully it will get better over time, with Instagram data feeding Places instead of only reading it.

It definitely serves Facebook's location directory of Places the most.

To all the people automatically assuming that this is a result of facebook acquiring instagram, what if this actually improves the user experience? What if instagram always wanted to integrate with facebook because they knew it was a better user experience and yet didn't because they knew facebook was instagram's #1 competitor? In that case the acquisition enables a positive.

I, for one, could not give a crap about foursquare and yet use facebook on a daily basis. I understand foursquare has its community of supporters but I don't think any objective person will argue that foursquare is on a solid trajectory. In that case, it'd make sense to go with a more established player.

The fact is, Foursquare has a truly excellent place database that's well-curated by users and is highly accurate due to the nature of their product.

Facebook does not. It has a mess of duplicate places and incorrect names due to the nature of their product. Hopefully this will be an impetus for improving their location database, but until then I don't see it being a better experience at all.

A contrarian "What if" question is fun and good to ask, but it's not automatically valid.

I can appreciated GP's optimism, but as someone who has actually utilized both data sets in various forms this is spot on.

Foursquare's data is vastly superior, something I attribute at least partially to the fact that they've built a service that incentivizes checking in, while Facebook is more heavily scrutinized for their questionable privacy practices. It'll be interesting to see if this continues to be the case when 4sq releases Swarm.

Facebook acquired Instagram not Foursquare.

woops :)

"solid trajectory" does not mean great user experience.

Obviously the acquisition changes the calculus no matter how independent the players claim the companies will continue to act independently.

However, I think you are quite possibly right. Acting independently does not preclude Instagram from switching to Facebook place information. There are large benefits to using Facebook data over Foursquare not the least of which is better data outside the US. And with Foursquare on perennial death watch and switching directions frequently (including very recently), switching away from it is probably a wise business decision.

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