How the World Looks to Your Phone | Hacker News Reader

How the World Looks to Your Phone

engineering.foursquare.com

57 pointsanand-s23 comments

Does anyone still use Foursquare? I was part of a wave of users when everyone I knew was checking in, and trying to earn badges, and race to the top of the weekly charts. In it's heyday, it was almost as popular as Draw Something's peak among my developer friends.

Now? I don't know anyone that uses it.

And the weird thing is, the FEATURES that it offers (menu recommendations, localized pictures) are still great and way better than showing up to some place and trying to find it on Yelp or Google Maps. And yet...I never use it.

I know some would blame the split of the app into two, but most people I knew abandoned Foursquare long before that.

It's a painful lesson in how difficult it is to shift expectation once a large group of people brand you as being use for x. Its why myspace couldnt be a music company, why Mel Gibson will always be seen as anti semtic and why it took Rob Lowe two decades to escape a sex tape. Its really hard to change peoples minds once their made up.

It's the classic example of a development team saying "our users are using the product incorrectly!"

Rather than realising that paving the cow-paths / respecting user wishes is an entirely acceptable way to build a decent business, they took the (understandable but wrong) move to try & shift their users' behaviour into a more profitable direction.

Foursquare was a decent service, had a great API, and a loyal following. It wasn't going to be a billion dollar business and that's ok!

I use foursquare much more since they removed the badge thing. IMHO, their advices on places are the best.

I wonder if that might be because everyone thinks of FourSquare as the "check into places" app. It's easy to dismiss it based on that.

When you consider the other features you mentioned, it seems far more compelling. Correct me if I'm wrong, but I think those features came after the check-in craze, right? So most people are unaware of what it has become, and still think about it as what it used to be.

I use it literally constantly for finding places to eat. Especially when I'm somewhere new and I don't know where the best places to go are.

It's incredibly good at finding those 'hidden gem' type places which aren't busy or popular but do amazing food.

It seems to have been a big mistake splitting Foursquare from Swarm though. While I use both heavily now (I do like doing the check-in thing), and I can see a lot of logic behind why they split them, it doesn't seem to have worked out well.

I still use Swarm. It's pretty fun and me and my friends are always checking into interesting places and posting interesting places.

I found Foursquare kind of useless and uninstalled it long ago. If I want to research where to go I use Yelp.

IMO the killer use case is for 4sq is for travel. When I'm on the road (most of the past few years) I care a lot more both in recording where I've been and getting recommendations. There are a few things that 4sq could do better in that regard - better romanization/local-English display and better segmentation of the data (locals vs tourists). Also it's hard to create/surface trip logs/lists and todo lists become useless when you have geographically disperse items (it always zooms globally and doesn't track your state).

Does anyone still use Foursquare?

The real question is, does Foursquare still use you?

(If you're not paying for it you're the product.)

> (If you're not paying for it you're the product.)

Yep, that's precisely how GNU Emacs and Linux work.

(I hate trite sayings.)

Why does every advertisement of a web technology nowadays seem to involve coffee and bagels?

Because java and javascript won.

because that is what engineers use as fuel :)

Here's the better fuel: tea and bananas. Actually Pepsi instead of tea today, but only because I'm in a hurry.

> So what does Foursquare do? Well, _our users_ have crawled the world _for us_ and _have told us_ more than 7 billion times where _they’re_ standing and what that place is called. _Each time they do_, we attach a little bit more data _to our models_ about how those places look _to our phones out_ in the real world. _To our phones_, the world looks like this:

(emphasis mine)

Isn't just me or Foursquare thinks that your phone, running their software, belongs to them?

It is possible that was what they meant, or was a freudian slip. A more charitable interpretation is that the "our" in "our models" encompasses a different subset of people than the "our" of "our phones". So it could been written "we attach a little bit more data to [Foursquare's] models about how those places look [users'] phones out in the real world". The latter replacement of "our" would assume that foursquare employees are also users of foursquare apps (which seems fairly reasonable).

But, if that's what they intended to say, it was somewhat ambiguously worded.

No, they probably think that the data that you generate from their software, running on your phone, belongs to them. Which is true.

True in practice, but not so true in other countries. Data generated by the end user belongs to them.

I would imagine that it is dependent on TOS.

Depends. Sometimes ownership of data is bound by law - by ToS you can give away some usage rights such as to use/modify/sell/whatnot.

Our app coming out won't have to deal with these issues.

And yet it will be able to connect people with places.

How did foursquare work at the beginning? Obviously they didn't have as much data then..

Before they split off into 2 apps? Data went to them, not the other way round.

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