
Instagram Dropping Foursquare for Facebook Places - wlindner
http://williamlindner.com/2014/05/13/instagram-dropping-foursquare.html
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rsobers
The immediate result: a diminished user experience. Strategy tax in full
effect.

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shkkmo
Don't worry. Facebook will never do something like this to the Oculus Rift.

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sreyaNotfilc
Love this quote!

But seriously, who didn't think this was going to happen?

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opendais
I hold out hope every time someone claims such BS, I like trying to be
optimistic.

I don't really -expect- them to follow through tho. :/

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untog
I'd be interested in the views of people that _aren 't_ in the US, and
especially not in Western countries. Foursquare's database is great in the US,
but when I've traveled I've found it to be nowhere near as good - I wonder if
- in those cases - Facebook Places is better.

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joefarish
It's pretty good here in London. It's very rare for me to find a place that
doesn't already exist in their Database.

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ceejayoz
Seems like a no-brainer. Facebook owning Instagram means this is just Facebook
ditching a competitor's product for their own.

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wlindner
After Facebook acquired Instagram they were really clear that they wanted them
to stay independent. I wonder how "independently" they made this decision to
switch to Facebook Places instead of Foursquare. Instagram ads are most likely
just Facebook's new ad platform. Facebook just removed their Camera app from
the app store
([http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2457866,00.asp](http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2457866,00.asp))
because Instagram IS their Camera app.

~~~
randomdrake
I can't think of any recent acquisitions where the same type of lies weren't
uttered.

"We're so happy to be joining Billion Corp. We feel that they will let us stay
independent and stick to our goals. We will continue to provide the same
awesome experience you all came to know and love before we sold out."

"We're so happy to be acquiring talent instead of finding it. We will totally
not, not make their project theirs instead of ours, depending on our lawyers,
and our shareholders. Frankly, we're just glad we didn't have to actually
spend time building a good product and hiring people like these folks, since
they would've never joined us in the first place."

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things
They seem to be following the same course with Moves, the fitness tracking app
they acquired recently.

You used to be able to tag locations with foursquare data, that feature was
removed in the latest update. I assume facebook places will be replacing them.

~~~
wlindner
WhatsApp uses Foursquare too
([https://developer.foursquare.com/showcase/](https://developer.foursquare.com/showcase/))
so, I guess that will use Facebook Places as well.

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mcnully
Facebook dropping Foursquare for Facebook Places

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wlindner
Bingo.

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joeblau
I'm not a deep user of Instagram, but I'm wondering if Facebook's places
database is better (more meta data, better accuracy, more user feedback, etc)
than Foresquare's location information?

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calinet6
No, they are not.

Foursquare has well-curated data that's easy for users to edit and update.
Duplicates are removed quickly, closed or moved places are updated almost
instantly. It's an excellent gamified system for building accurate location
data.

Facebook, on the other hand, allows you to attach a freeform place to anything
(photo, event, review, whatever). These freeform places are not managed well.
In a cursory search for a common park in my city, there were 12 duplicates and
8-10 irrelevant only slightly related places returned. The correct place was
at the top, but a duplicate was in the top 10.

It could be an Apple Maps situation. Bad now, but likely will get better as
people use it more.

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bigdubs
So, this seems like a big deal, but really it just means when you go to tag a
place in your post ... the place won't be there and you'll skip the location
tag on your post.

If anything, it'll improve Facebook Places because people will enter more
venues, as I'd imagine more people tag locations in instagram than use
Facebook's social checkin feature.

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GFischer
I'd like to see some data, but at least in my country Facebook has vastly more
location data than Foursquare.

As many have said, Facebooks' data is not necessarily very good (especially
lots of duplicates).

calinet6 said it best:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7743917](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7743917)

I do agree that this move will probably contribute better data to Facebook
Places.

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bluthru
"Instagram Just Geotagged Us To Hell: When Politics Drive Product Decisions,
We All Lose"

[https://medium.com/five-hundred-words/dad4c3736409](https://medium.com/five-
hundred-words/dad4c3736409)

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minikites
Hopefully it will get better over time, with Instagram data feeding Places
instead of only reading it.

~~~
wlindner
It definitely serves Facebook's location directory of Places the most.

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zaidf
To all the people automatically assuming that this is a result of facebook
acquiring instagram, what if this actually _improves_ the user experience?
What if instagram always wanted to integrate with facebook because they knew
it was a better user experience and yet didn't because they knew facebook was
instagram's #1 competitor? In that case the acquisition enables a positive.

I, for one, could not give a crap about foursquare and yet use facebook on a
daily basis. I understand foursquare has its community of supporters but I
don't think any objective person will argue that foursquare is on a solid
trajectory. In that case, it'd make sense to go with a more established
player.

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calinet6
The fact is, Foursquare has a truly excellent place database that's well-
curated by users and is highly accurate due to the nature of their product.

Facebook does not. It has a mess of duplicate places and incorrect names due
to the nature of their product. Hopefully this will be an impetus for
improving their location database, but until then I don't see it being a
better experience at all.

A contrarian "What if" question is fun and good to ask, but it's not
automatically valid.

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lepht
I can appreciated GP's optimism, but as someone who has actually utilized both
data sets in various forms this is spot on.

Foursquare's data is vastly superior, something I attribute at least partially
to the fact that they've built a service that incentivizes checking in, while
Facebook is more heavily scrutinized for their questionable privacy practices.
It'll be interesting to see if this continues to be the case when 4sq releases
Swarm.

