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The Hack That Brought Foursquare Back From The Dead
- untog 13y agoThis problem isn't solved yet. For me at least. I turned on the passive notifications, and they started going off when I was traveling on above ground sections of the subway. Or when I got out by my office. So I turned them off. Somehow Foursquare needs to crack working out when I want those notifications and when they're irrelevant. They should have enough data to do it.
- lnanek2 13y agoYeah, I've been using 4sq for years and still do, but just don't have any use for the passive notifications. They only crop up when I'm going somewhere or doing something already. Most amusingly, they've been showing up on flights lately and they are actually correct. Not sure how that even happens since I know Google's WiFi database tends to just have the wrong location for train and plane WiFi in my experience. I'll hop on a train in NYC and it will say I'm in Boston.
- gky2 13y agoI've actually never used Four Square myself but I saw a lot of people use it back in the day... This new feature seems like just the stepping stone for them to implement what they really want, so hopefully in the near future it'll process the type of data you two have mentioned here.
- drakaal 13y agoSummary: FourSquare is moving from a checkin service to doing positioning data at higher accuracy and lower power based on big data. http://www.skyhookwireless.com/ http://www.skyhookwireless.com/ does the same thing. Maybe not as well, but generally the same.
- GrinningFool 13y agofoursquare is still around? Hyperbole aside, I thought foursquare was an excellent idea - and if more businesses around me used it, I"d probably still be using it myself. (Reading the article, it seems that if you live in NYC or SF it's a lot more useful than it's been to me.) As it is, I think the last time I even looked at it was nearly six months ago.
- protomyth 13y ago"if you live in NYC or SF it's a lot more useful than it's been to me" It seems like services that bring people from vast geographic distances (e.g. Facebook, Twitter) have a longer life than services the geo-limit the audience. If you're in NYC, SF, or LA, geo-limited services work due to density, but you the threshold seems to dive after a couple of cities down the list. Color was the ultimate example for me on something that was so geo-limited that I couldn't imagine it working.
- hnriot 13y agoIt's the density that make Foursquare more popular in SF and NYC but rather the demographics of those areas, modern, high tech centers of urban sophistication. The fly over states are more concerned with the latest developments in pickups and gun racks to care much about checking in at the hottest espresso bar.
- wuliwong 13y agoPowerful insights.
- protomyth 13y ago"The fly over states are more concerned with the latest developments in pickups and gun racks to care much about checking in at the hottest espresso bar." I hope with that username this is a parody account because that line is by far one of the most ignorant, prejudice lines for HN.
- frogpelt 13y agoWhile it's true that people in rural areas often don't care about the same things that people in big cities care about that doesn't mean they are oblivious or opposed to new technology. I have a friend who is a commercial poultry farmer in rural Mississippi. He can turn on his chicken house feeders from anywhere in the world with a smart phone app. Some of the coolest technology being built is farm-related. People, no matter where they live, just want technology that makes their lives better in some way.
- lucb1e 13y agoPage is blank when adblock is enabled. Anyone else having this problem? I just won't read this article now. Not my problem.
- protomyth 13y agoUsing Safari with ad blocker and I can see the content. I really didn't want to install an ad blocker but the damn pop-ups were getting too much.
- GuerraEarth 13y agoEven worse are the audio ads.
- protomyth 13y agoNo doubt. I wonder how many people have the sound off on their computer's until they actually need to hear something?
- thetrb 13y agoThe site is working for me with Chrome and Adblock Plus
- nisa 13y agoCan confirm the problem on Chrome 31 and Firefox 25 - Adblock Plus / Ghostery. Subscriptions: Malware Domains / Fanboy's Social Blocking List / EasyPrivacy / Easylist Germany+Easylist
- drcube 13y agoFirefox 24 on W7 with adblock plus, it works for me. But I also have noscript with 14 out of 26 scripts blocked on that page. That probably helps.
- mintplant 13y ago> Foursquare already had a massive database of check-ins — location information about the places its users most liked to go. And this data didn’t just include the place where someone had checked in. It showed how strong the GPS signal was at the time, how strong each surrounding Wi-Fi hotspot signal was, what local cell towers were nearby, and so on. Leveraging this data meant that Foursquare could still grab a good current location even if users were underground, near a source of radio interference, or facing some other signal obstacle. Chances are, some prior Foursquare user had seen the world through the same flawed eyes and reported his or her location. This sounds more valuable as a technology than the social network side of the business itself. If another company wanted to build up a similar database of location information, they could send out a fleet of its own staff all over the world to collect it, à la Google's Street View cars. But Foursquare has managed to sidestep all of this expense and infrastructure by harnessing its userbase as a massive, free source of data input. Through badges, recommendations, and deals with local stores, they've created an incentive to provide the data they need. And through the mechanisms they have to prevent cheating in the game side of things, they've accidentally developed a way to ensure the accuracy of the location information their system can provide. Licensing out this technology could become the long-sought-after profit engine for Foursquare, paying the bills for the flashy social network layer on top that keeps the data flowing in.
- pdenya 13y ago> Licensing out this technology Foursquare is looking years ahead, it seems unlikely that they'd switch to a short term strategy. You have to assume that this technique will be adopted by Apple & Google at some point.
- jgh 13y agoI thought they already were using all this information to figure out your location. Google Maps knows pretty much exactly where in my building I'm sitting at with my laptop (I live in a long building spanning a block and the dot is over my apartment). So maybe not all that information, but going from the idea of fingerprinting a location with WiFi networks to other kinds of radio signal information doesn't really seem like a huge leap in thinking (though perhaps the implementation is tougher)
- raldi 13y agoTo save you some reading, the crux of the hack is to consider a weak GPS (etc) signal not as a lack of data, but rather as a source of data in itself: the fact that the GPS signal is weak tells you something about the user's probable location.
- visakanv 13y agoThat's pretty clever. Cool beans.
- justinsb 13y agoIsn't this exactly how location is always done without GPS? Look at the strengths of all the radio signals we can see, and match against known locations? Admittedly it's previously been primarily cell-towers & wi-fi, not GPS signal strength, and I thought most of the previous data had been collected by people that also had GPS, not via foursquare checkins... If not, why does my Android phone ask me to turn on wi-fi to enhance location information? Edit: To answer my own question, the Android source code for this used to be available. At the time, they passed the visible wi-fi SSIDs and the cell-tower IDs, but not the signal strength (they had it in both cases). Not sure why they didn't pass the strength. Maybe it made caching really hard; maybe it sufficed just to pass them in order; maybe it didn't make a big enough difference... http://www.netmite.com/android/mydroid/frameworks/base/location/java/com/android/internal/location/LocationMasfClient.java http://www.netmite.com/android/mydroid/frameworks/base/locat... To me, this actually raises more questions. It's so surprising to me that Google don't pass the signal strengths ("everyone knows" that is how triangulation works), that I'm thinking the real secret is that the signal strength isn't actually helpful. In other words, I'd bet Google tried what FourSquare have discovered, and rejected it. Or it's patented :-)
- mutagen 13y agoThe primary purpose of WiFi to enhance location information is to bootstrap the download of current GPS orbits (the ephemeris) [1]. More advanced techniques relying on radio signal strengths, RTT time, and other observables [2] are being developed but I don't know of any in widespread use. I wouldn't be surprised to see something emerge soon though. [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Assisted_GPS http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Assisted_GPS [2] One example: http://ws2.binghamton.edu/fowler/Improving%20WLAN-Based%20Indoor%20Mobile%20Positioning%20Using%20Sparsity.pdf http://ws2.binghamton.edu/fowler/Improving%20WLAN-Based%20In...
- coob 13y agoI wonder if they're going to start using the M7 in the 5s for even more info that will help with this.
- antr 13y agoOn Europe and Foursquare: is it just me or their data quality in Europe is really weak? A couple of weeks ago I tried using an app that uses foursquare's API and I couldn't find 4-5 restaurants in London I wanted to tag/save (each time I was sitting at the restaurants in question). Instead I had to use Google Maps to save the location of these places, otherwise I couldn't of done so.
- schnevets 13y agoI always loathed Foursquare because it interfered with social occassions. You and some buddies walk into a location, and suddenly everyone has to take out cell phones. It's relieving to hear that the company's strategy was always to become less obtrusive. I may actually download the new app now.
- lnanek2 13y agoI've actually found it to be a social benefit myself. Most of the people I go out with use it and we tend to compete and discuss what picture and tagline we're going to use and who is better and who checks in first. Much of the time the conversation later goes on to what cool things our friends did lately or if we can tell it is snowing somewhere better through 4sq or Instagram, often with much showing of the phones to each other. I guess younger generations build technology into their lives whereas for older people it is just an interruption. Try just friending everyone everywhere you go and eventually you'll have cool people all over the world doing fun things that can start conversations instead of stop them.
- VLM 13y ago"I guess younger generations build technology into their lives whereas for older people it is just an interruption." I hardly speak for every obsolete senior citizen over the age of 25, but its more of a perception of what is good or bad taste rather than neo-amish-ness. Social etiquette. For any elderly geezer over the age of, perhaps, 30, walking into a social occasion and ignoring the meatspace people to instead play with a phone would be considered intentionally highly insulting. If gentlemanly behavior means always doing everything possible to increase the comfort of those around you, which is a reasonable short definition, ignoring people to play on the phone doesn't score very high.
- morganb180 13y agoThe notification fatigue is going to set in. Not sure this is a sustainable growth lever.
- austinl 13y agoA bit of background - "geofencing" has been around in iOS as part of Core Location since version 4.0. Given latitude and longitude, you can pass in a radius and create a circular region (or specify a set and create a rectangle), with callbacks that trigger when the user enters or exits that region. One of the main points in the article is that it's particularly battery intensive to update the user's location, so there's a trade off between accuracy and battery usage. To try and solve this, Apple created a hierarchy of accuracy constants, which range from "best" to three kilometers, but it's only somewhat effective at preserving battery life. The other strategy is monitoring "significant changes" in location, based on cell towers/wifi signals. For this, Apple provides a method called "startMonitoringSignificantLocationChanges" if your app needs to constantly monitor the user's location. From what the article said, Foursquare is trying to improve these methods by creating probabilistic maps so they can draw better regions for each user, and therefore check for location updates less frequently. I'm assuming there are similar methods for Android. Here's the documentation for one of the main classes in Core Location called CLRegion: https://developer.apple.com/library/ios/documentation/CoreLocation/Reference/CLRegion_class/Reference/Reference.html https://developer.apple.com/library/ios/documentation/CoreLo...
- hendzen 13y agoAnother year, another Foursquare pivot.
- yason 13y agoFunny enough, I prefer to disable any existing notifications so that I can walk about or sit around undisturbed. (SMS and phone calls are ok, but mostly because I get them so rarely and if I do they actually might be important.)
- jgalt212 13y agoHas anyone ever read an article on Foursquare without a picture of Dennis Crowley in it?