Foursquare's Dennis Crowley can't stop believing | Hacker News Reader

Foursquare's Dennis Crowley can't stop believing

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34 pointssteven33 comments

> A mixture. One of my proudest moments at Foursquare was March 2011 at South By Southwest. In my keynote there, I described it as if we just pulled a Mr. Miyagi on you guys. You think that you’re checking in to get points and badges — and meanwhile we just made an awesome personalized local search engine for you! You think that you’re washing a car but you’re really learning karate! This is what we wanted to do all along. From that moment, Foursquare was about search and recommendations — a smarter search engine that learns about where you go. But by that point, people were so into the game stuff that they either couldn’t see or didn’t see it.

This is so incredibly arrogant. It's not that people couldn't see it or didn't see it, it's that they didn't want it. The game features made 4sq unique and fun. People don't want a "personalized local search engine" because there aren't millions of restaurants and bars around where they're at right now. It's just not that big of a problem to find a place to eat and yes, while they do an ok job helping out if you are looking for that, so does Yelp.

I disagree. I don't know anyone who thought that gaming stuff was fun. It was silly and a waste of time. Foursquare now is great at recommendations - something people actually need. I don't think it was necessary to rip the checkins out of it and into Swarm but I think the people who actually found that fun and a vocal minority.

My anecdotes are the complete opposite of yours :)

My friends loved checking in and earning badges and none of them think the recommendations are great.

:) Strange. I don't understand why they split the app. If they kept it together all our friends could have been happy.

Some background on their rationale: https://medium.com/@noah_weiss/the-lego-block-exercise-4c7d6...

It reads like they keep wanting to back the product into their theories regardless of if there's a market for it or if their existing user base wanted those changes. My personal feeling was they discovered that the gamification angle was successful but the market wasn't huge so they got pressured into a change in direction to a (theoretically) larger market by their investors. All of these interviews and pontifications seem like justification for that move. It doesn't seem to have worked out well.

It was silly, sure. But it worked and it encouraged people to check-in AND leave reviews. All of the reviews (or "tips" how they call it) I left were the ones I left after checking-in. Splitting Foursquare into two apps was a mistake. Nearly all of my friends have Swarm installed but most haven't kept the Foursquare app around. The functionality worked great in unison.

The problem is I don't know anyone who wouldn't just use Yelp for recommendations, my wife being the closest example.

Personally, I have no use for recommendations, but enjoy seeing my friends pictures and comments as they check in, so Foursquare as it is now is useless to me whereas before it had some interest and I caught some tech events I would have otherwise missed.

I agree with a lot of your commentary, but think that Yelp is a horrible place to try to sift through shameless paid plugs and trolls. My experience is that 4sq has some of the highest signal-to-noise ratio of local reviews... for now.

I actually use a mix of both and find that 4sq works better in some cities and Yelp in others. Both are pretty bad as far as reviews/tips go. I pretty much discount everything I read there. 4sq is nice because I can see which of my friends have been to a location, which is a lot more meaningful to me than some random person's opinion of a place. Ironically THAT feature has been downplayed in 4sq. After reading Crowley's interview, I guess it's because it's not part of the search vision.

I would consider myself an outlier in terms of how much I go out and travel though. Most "regular people" I talk to maybe go out once a week to their favorite spot. I just don't think discovery is that large of a market.

> After reading Crowley's interview, I guess it's because it's not part of the search vision.

Which isn't really smart. Friends usually share a common taste, so if all my friends like some venue, any smart search engine would give priority to showing me that first.

>People don't want a "personalized local search engine" because there aren't millions of restaurants and bars around where they're at right now. It's just not that big of a problem to find a place to eat and yes, while they do an ok job helping out if you are looking for that, so does Yelp.

Hm, I would wager that there is a considerable population of people who would want - and use - a personalized, local search engine, so long as it lived up to its promise.

Second, people have preferences. My hunch is that people's criteria for finding a restaurant are more nuanced than simply '[finding] a place to eat', or a place that serves food. They may want to find a place with Thai food that's affordable, or an American restaurant with vegan options that rarely has a wait, or a pizza place open at 11pm within walking distance of the job they're walking home from.

Last, there are 26,000 restaurants in New York City. For people living in metropolitan areas, there are many options from which to choose. Fortunate people are not living in survival mode or using apps to seek minimum means of shelter (nod to Maslow and his hierarchy). The drivers in decision-making are more complex and could be a careful balance of any number of factors, such as convenience, speed, cost, acceptance, mood and so on.

Add in entertainment, parks, museums, music venues, activities, and so forth - and personalized local search becomes increasingly valuable. If Foursquare can accomplish its goal and distill the signal from the noise, save people time, and allow them to have delightful experiences, then I would want it, and use it.

Other people might, too, but I can't speak for them.

That office makes me shudder. I feel like I live in a palace in my cube.

All the modern "People Operations" research by Google, Facebook, and others, has concluded that the garment industry a hundred years ago had it exactly right:

http://ursulinemagazine.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/11/jfco_...

What research is that? All the research coming out recently has been saying that open plan offices are bad for productivity.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/posteverything/wp/2014/12/30/g...

There's a big difference between a manual worker and a software developer.

I think - and hope - the parent is being sarcastic.

I wasn't kidding about Google and Facebook. Facebook has been "open plan" since forever, with rows of monitors on long tables, and Google has talked publicly about their research on optimal collaboration environments, which concludes that you need to pack engineers densely so they'll share ideas (and then have some common public space as well).

Unfortunately I just spent 5 minutes trying to dig up the original articles, without luck.

Oh yeah, sorry I didn't mean to dismiss that part as sarcasm. I've seen those articles too.

to each his/her own. I've worked in both settings before and I felt like I was dying in a cube.

I wouldn't work in either. A cube isn't really much/any of an improvement on open plan.

I never thought I'd envy cube workers but having worked in a open office/co-working space I do. I really do.

If I were Foursquare I'd admit defeat, drop Swarm, do a big push to relaunch Foursquare with a new app (if nothing else just to get people interested again) and think really hard about a killer feature to lure people back into the app.

One aspect that's really underplayed I think they could go with as a complement is diary and life tracking. It could be very interesting to have as an experience where you could relive where you've been and done.

you mean what Timehop does?

Timehop is pretty limited in its scope, I'd do a fullblown diary & life tracker

The split between foursquare and swarm was awful. It was rather useless, and all my friends that used foursquare dropped it at that moment.

I myself dropped it because the new version required me to install Google Play Services/Framework - something I had no interest in doing.

I currently don't know anybody who uses foursquare. The "game" part faded, and the "finding a place" part moved over to Yelp.

I'm counting them out, data from 5 years ago isn't all that useful

Yeah...It's been less than a year since I've left New York but even then, so many places have closed down/opened up...and this is completely independent of the downtrend in user-supplied data to Foursquare.

I can't help but feel that releasing Swarm was akin to giving someone a lateral "promotion" within an org to remove them from a space you don't want them in any longer, like Milton being moved into the basement in Office Space. They wanted to pivot, but with check-in so core to their identity, they had to move it to the basement so the rest of the core app could flourish.

Does anyone here actively use Swarm or any other Ambient Social Network? Why & what is your take? Like the various other Ambient Social Networking apps that came before it (Highlight, Sonar, Banjo), it would seem to suffer from a severe chicken and egg problem.

I use swarm, and the reason I use it is timehop.

The ambient social networking is a side benefit, that ramped up following my adoption of foursquare, and is slowly tailing off as everyone drops swarm. It's nice as a source of real time recommendations from people you trust, and as a source of small talk, however it's not that important to me. But tracking myself from a year ago is generally rewarding.

I've been trying to use Swarm because I have friends who do, but the interface is so atrociously bad, they should fire that designer and sue for damages. Months later I still have no fucking idea which icon does what, I just tap random things until something happens. And it doesn't allow private check-ins, so it discourages me from checking-in somewhere unless I want to broadcast it to all of my friends. Do they want my data or not?

It's hard not to hate on foursquare at this point. I mean how much press and mind share have they squandered that could have been better used by other start ups trying to get over the hump.

I'm not counting FourSquare out yet, just because of the strength of the data they have. Of course, that makes them a very tempting acquisition target, and I expect it'll happen sooner or later.

Their data is getting more and more stale by the day. They rely on users for that data, so as the users go, so does the relevant data.

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