With FourSquare’s continued rise in popularity, I have noticed a definite challenge with the service in popular areas, namely… WHICH place name do you use to check-in?
For example, here I am at the Philadelphia International Airport and a quick search on “PHL” in FourSquare gives you 25+ results… with even more that don’t use PHL in the text. As the image shows, there are many different levels of granularity, too, with locations being created for specific gates and even for specific seats on flights.
Where do you check-in?
Part of the issue is that in many ways you are incented to create new locations. You get extra points for adding a new location… and may have an easier job of becoming “mayor” of a new place if that is important to you.
There are also times when it is simply easier to add a new place than to wait for FourSquare’s servers to “locate” you.
It all adds up to a lot of “places” and some resulting confusion over which place to use when checking in. As FourSquare matures the folks there may need to do some curation and pruning and merging of places. Or perhaps start showing results ranked by number of checkins… or votes… or something like that.
Right now, as it starts up, the “Wild West” approach (anything goes) makes a lot of sense… but as more folks use FourSquare, it may make sense to provide a bit more guidance in terms of which place name people should use when checking in.
What do you think? What should FourSquare do about this? Or should they do nothing and just let it be as it is?
Hey Dan –
Been thinking a lot about this. On one hand, I like the granularity. On the other, the data is getting messy very quickly. We see the same problem w JFK and SFO that we do for PHI… would love to hear your take on what you think the best steps are.
– @dens
co-founder, foursquare
I’ve seen that same problem myself. One possible solution is to leverage the crowd in flagging multiple locations under different names. If you find a duplicate you should get 5 points for bringing it to foursquare’s attention. Now, we just need to find something to use those points for.
Simon
A few unfleshed out, high-level ideas:
1) could be interesting to consider opening up the FSQ dataset (although not sure how happy wcities would be about that)…stil, that might clean things up a bit if you can accept contributions in bulk – especially if there’s a creative way to do it (such as a wiki – in addition to a potential API)
2) users should maybe have to default to a level of granularity that doesn’t expose these options to them and if they want more options it’s a preference in the app (but they don’t see it by default) you’d have to creatively filter out the noise..
3) maybe people who create new zones in a region should temporarily have to give up points to do it until someone else comes along and checksin there, then they can claim the bounty – although this could be gamed…
Yes, to begin with you need the “wisdom of crowds” approach to entering all the possible places in the database. I’m sure Foursquare is a small organisation, so relying on all of the users makes sense. Of course this is a problem of trust, since some will duplicate without properly searching. I dare say that some have even entered misleading or incorrect information on purpose (!).
With so many location efforts operating now (Brightkite, Aka-aki, Gowalla, Google, FireEagle, Rummble, Buddycloud, Nulaz, Layar, I could go on…), it would be nice if everyone could share database and gazeteer information for consistency (and compatibility). Still, that would leave a lot of these companies with no differentiation…