Foursquare effect

The race between technology companies with one goal: to tell you what to do with your free time, free evening and everything else free can end today with the release of the popular geolocation social network. According to the company, the long-awaited recommendations will finally be included.

It's one thing - when the service recommends you to movies, music and other products that you may like. Quite another when the automatic system says where you can go by slamming the door of your house, and which places in the city you should visit. This area is trying to affect a huge number of already-non-startups, including Facebook and Google.

A huge world of recommendations

Within each question of the type: “Where should I go?” There are always a lot of details that need clarification: What should I eat? What to buy? How much can I spend? What is the purpose of my life?
Foursquare wants to be a service that can regularly answer similar questions for millions of people.
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And this is a very ambitious goal. It reminds of a question that Google found the answer to: “Which webpage can show me information about what I’m interested in?” And no matter how big the Internet is, the real world is much bigger, richer and more interesting.

Recommendations in the real world carry a greater risk (in the sense of the ultimate cost to the consumer, time and effort) than in the network, but the reward for them is much higher (in the sense of experience and potential activity) compared to network purchases or the absorption of media content. Can Foursquare properly set up recommendations and reach enormous potential?

What is on the table at Foursquare

The company first began a public experiment with recommendations six months ago. Three months ago, a data scientist job vacancy appeared on Foursquare, hinting at the imminent appearance of a person who would be involved in this business.

Almost two years have passed since the launch, the company has 7.5 million customers who have made a total of 500,000,000 check-ins. Foursquare did not disclose the number of places marked, but as a first approximation, users have about 10 million bars, restaurants, parks, shops, and other places where people meet around the world. If this figure is correct, then each establishment in Foursquare was marked by about 50 different people. All this looks like a healthy soil for analysis.

Here is what the guys themselves say about this in their blog:

“The idea is simple: tell us what you are looking for and we will try to help you find something nearby. Assumptions are based on a little bit of everything: the places where you have been, your loyalty to your favorite places, and so on. We will even say why, in our opinion, you should go to a certain place (note: popular among friends, like a favorite). This will help when searching for interesting places by main categories, like “food”, “coffee”, “night club” (we add a quick search in similar places), but you will also be surprised by the result when you search for specific places, like “music 80” , “Fireworks”, “pancakes”, “romance”, etc. The result will be more interesting if you visit different places.

When we started working with the recommendation mechanism, we picked up a huge amount of “experience” from information. This means that we see your friends who have visited every karaoke bar within a radius of 10 km from your home or tried every dumpling in St. Petersburg. Now there is an opportunity to receive such information and follow the call of your friends in the categories and places that they like most.

Now, with over half a million entry points and daily replenishment of check-ins and notes, Foursquare is getting smarter for you, your friends, and the entire community. We found that using it is equally effective when you are looking for a place to have breakfast near your home, or for the first time exploring a new city for you. ”

It sounds great, but time will tell if Foursquare will succeed. It is good to hear that they approached the solution of this question right away from nine sides:

1. Your story
2. The history of your friends
3. Loyalty to your favorite places
4. Favorite categories
5. Popular places among all users
6. Day of the week
7. Request time
8. Quality descriptions (tips)
9. Expert opinion

Will facility owners work on these factors in order to attract more potential visitors? Maybe someday this day will come.

Battle design

With so many moving parts, this engineering task will definitely not be easy for Foursquare - but the end result is of tremendous value. The user’s reaction comes right away: he is either intrigued by the new place, or he has already been there and rather scrolls through, in an attempt to find something new. We'll have to try to be really useful in this situation.

Will the team, when looking at so different information sources coming from mobile devices, stationary computers, as a result of a semi-gaming social experiment, send a signal that will force users to go and use recommendations, to visit new places, offline? Probably this is exactly the function that made many people who recently looked at Foursquare and anyway asked “what's the point?” To change their mind. Reconsider the perception of this value.

“I think many people don’t want Google to answer their questions,” Eric Schmidt said last summer: “They want Google to tell them what they need to do.”

Foursquare 3.0 for iPhone and Android is already available.

By: Marshall Kirkpatrick, for ReadWriteWeb