7 ms·
Foursquare now gives ratings for locations, becomes Yelp competitor
"Foursquare has launched a seemingly small update to its iOS app, adding a 1 to 10 score that appears next to the name of a place. This makes it an instant competitor for many of the recommendation surfacing services like Yelp."
- rdl 14y agoIn 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.
- Shenglong 14y ago"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.
- rdl 14y agoI 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-wg 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.)
- mahyarm 14y agoAlmost sounds like you want something like zagat.
- rdl 14y agoZagat 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.
- jorgeortiz85 14y agoWe 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.
- rdl 14y agoAwesome (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.
- ianstallings 14y agoAny 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?
- jorgeortiz85 14y agoI 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.
- wahdeh 14y ago> 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-pay-by-phone-advances-square-takes-another-leap-state-of-the-art.html?_r=3&pagewanted=all http://www.nytimes.com/2012/07/19/technology/personaltech/as... [2] http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/07/12/levelup-zero-scvngr/ http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/07/12/levelup-zero-scvngr...
- zevyoura 14y agoAs 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.
- rdl 14y agoIt 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.
- danso 14y agoI wonder if that really adds much information value in the grand scheme of things. Yelp is built for ratings and reviews and I can't see myself making the extra trip to Foursquare to see how its users rate something when Yelp will be far more useful. But what 4sq has that Yelp doesn't is number of visits (per user) and time-relation of visits between places. Instead of ratings, a metric unique to 4sq would be repeat visits (cleaned in such a way to eliminate superficial checkins) and where people go immediately before and after visiting a given place. I would rather see that kind of behavioral data leveraged more than have one more place where people rate things
- iciclesandwich 14y ago> I would rather see that kind of behavioral data leveraged more than have one more place where people rate things FTFA: > The data is based on a bunch of data that Foursquare collects, which it says result in more accurate and varied results than the typical ‘other site’, where ratings can all meet in the middle. You basically just asked for exactly what the article infers that they're doing already.
- danso 14y agoYep, I deserve a "RTFA award" So I'll rephrase and say that the rating, as it seems to be presented in the app, doesn't give enough context to show how it is different from how 1 to 10 ratings are done elsewhere.
- jorgeortiz85 14y agoFoursquare ratings are indeed based on these kinds of implicit signals that we can infer from the data. There is currently no way to explicitly rate a venue on Foursquare.
- dude_abides 14y agoLocal search today is in the state that web search was in, pre-Google. There are lots of Yahoos and Altavistas, but no Google (Yelp is so reminiscent of Yahoo web search). Foursquare still has a long way to go before it can consistently give better results than Yelp, but this is a great start! Hope some startups get inspired by this and realize that local search is not a dead problem to work on!
- rhizome 14y agoHeck, it's in the same state it was post-Google, too, when Citysearch was the disruptor. Yelp started out good, probably very akin to where Foursquare is now (clean-ish data, fresh perspective), but tolerated too much garbage, much like Citysearch did, until the user has to over-engineer their search in order to get relevant results that aren't contained in 400 pages, 5 items per page. Think of how long it's been since Yelp added any filtering criteria. Take a look at their user-photo gallery functionality. Old, stagnant, and ripe for a new generation. However, since sites have been repeating these mistakes for 15 years, there's no indication that any of these are solvable problems.
- unoti 14y agoI am so glad for this. Yelp ratings have been horribly un-useful to me. Their questionable business practices aside, it's really hard for me to figure out good places to eat when I'm in an unfamiliar city. And Yelp's ratings are to me useless: highly recommended places which are terrible, and mediocre recommendations on places that are actually quite good for what they're aiming to be. One good thing about Yelp is it tells you if places are open now or not, and what kind of dress code to expect. Yelp provides a service I really need in a way and from a company that I really don't like, so I'm delighted to hear about competition!
- irishloop 14y agoThe problems you're talking about are never going to be solved by ratings companies because you're talking about a completely subjective experience. There is no such thing as an objectively good restaurant. In my town, there are famous pizza places which people absolutely love and then others who think it's an overrated, pretentious mess. Nevermind attempting to control for different waiters, chefs, people having a bad day, etc. The problem isn't Yelp-specific. The problem is entirely human.
- unoti 14y agoYes, and no. The problems of what movies I might like or what music I like are also entirely human, but Netflix and Pandora have been doing a way better job of figuring that out than Yelp has. And what motivation does Yelp have to do better, anyway-- they don't get their money from me, they get it from venue providers both awesome and terrible.
- panabee 14y agoThe motivation is to improve their service or risk losing users like you. They have no business model without happy users.
- mbesto 14y agoNetflix and Pandora are largely frictionless experiences. If I spend the money and time to get in a cab in NYC to go to a restaurant that sucks, I'm upset. That's the problem that Yelp is trying to solve. I can't quickly "change the channel" with Yelp, or any sort of ratings for that matter. It isn't a technical or algorithmic problem, it's a human one that doesn't scale well. Quantify != Qualify.
- zaidf 14y agoLast night at 11pm, I stood a block from penn station trying to find a Subway sandwhich store that was still open. Armed with my iphone, it took me a full 15-20 minutes and a half dozen calls before I found one. Sometimes I feel like companies like foursquare would be better off working on much, much more basic(and less glamorous) problems than ratings and check-ins stuff.
- harryh 14y agoIf only...using our checkin data...there was some sort of way we could figure out when a place was likely to be open. Hrmmmmmmm. It all fits together my friend. These things just take some time to get done. -harryh PS: Imagine you had access to billions of checkins covering 10s of millions of users and places all over the world. What sort of interesting things could you do with that data? Feel like you have some great ideas? http://foursquare.jobs http://foursquare.jobs
- stevewillows 14y agoDon't forget to add on the xkcd comic! http://xkcd.com/1098/ http://xkcd.com/1098/ The trouble with these rating systems is that they're usually done by one of two groups: people who wish they were foodies or people who had a bad experience. It's nice to see Foursquare get into this space, but like another commenter said -- it'd be nice to see them tackle the minor issues like hours of operations and menus (maybe through some sort of reward?).
- harryh 14y agoWe definitely agree that menus + hours and all sorts of things like that are important too. We've already got a couple hundred thousand menus in the system and are working on getting more.
- stevewillows 14y agoI wish you the best success with the new features. We're excited to build up our local area.
- byproxy 14y agoPeople who wish they were foodies? What makes a true foodie?
- stevewillows 14y agoOk, that wasn't fair. A proper foodie is an aficionado. To compare it to tech, it's the difference between someone who understand technology and has a background in it versus a self-proclaimed 'techno-geek' who slobbers over a best buy flyer.
- rgrieselhuber 14y agoThey should have become a yelp competitor in 2009, back when people still used Foursquare.
- bigdubs 14y agothe many orders of magnitude number of active users today disagree with you.
- eigenvector 14y agoMaybe Foursquare peaked in the Bay Area in 2009, but as a user since 2010 in Toronto, I can safely say that 4sq has been consistently trending upward since I got it. I think the same is true of every city in the world that isn't SF or NY.
- mathattack 14y agoMy reaction to this is, "It's about time!" Yelp needs a competitor. Foursquare needs to be more useful.
- rcacique 14y agoI personally prefer http://yask.it http://yask.it 1 to 10 ratings make people think too much, with yaskit is a 5 questions survey, 5 star rating and 1 open question, simple.
- Oompa 14y agoI think Foursquare has been a Yelp competitor since they launched the Explore feature. I've been using it to find good stuff that my friends have been to. I'm likely to check out a place if a good friend of mine has been there several times than if a few strangers have given it 5/5 stars.
- hnriot 14y agoThe problem with this is that everyone uses Yelp and nobody but hipsters uses foursquare. I'm fact even hipsters have moved on from foursquare. Without liquidity of use any ratings system will just be so sparse as to be anecdotal. I don't see a problem wit yelp, reading only a star rating isn't a good way to make it useful, you have to speed read and sample the reviews. At a glance I can tell a reviewer who's fake, or one of the many that just like to hear the sound of their own voice, or they are just an opinionated asshole. But when you speed read a few comments you can pick up general trends. For example if many reviewers all say a hotel was noisy there might be something in it. Ditto for amazon. The "solution" that some have tried is to rate the rating, then use a pagerank-link algorithm to module the effect any one rater on the rating. In other words, if many people who themselves have been rated at rating highly accurately, then my influence on a rating is higher. The suggestions I have seen here (mainly collaborative filtering) may be of merit, if that's have foursquare plan to do it then with more of a representative sampling of users and maybe it will work well. Currently though they would need a lot more users. But personally I find yelp very useful, it just requires more effort than glancing at the star rating.