

Foursquare now gives ratings for locations, becomes Yelp competitor - trendspotter
http://thenextweb.com/apps/2012/11/05/foursquare-now-gives-1-10-ratings-for-locations-in-its-ios-app-becomes-yelp-competitor-overnight/
"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."
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unoti
I 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
The 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
Yes, 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.

~~~
mbesto
Netflix 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.

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rdl
In 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.

~~~
jorgeortiz85
We 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.

~~~
ianstallings
Any 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
I 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.

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dude_abides
Local 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
Heck, 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.

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zaidf
Last 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
If 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>

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danso
I 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
> 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
Yep, 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.

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hnriot
The 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.

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mathattack
My reaction to this is, "It's about time!"

Yelp needs a competitor.

Foursquare needs to be more useful.

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stevewillows
Don't forget to add on the xkcd comic!

<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
We 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
I wish you the best success with the new features. We're excited to build up
our local area.

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Oompa
I 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.

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rgrieselhuber
They should have become a yelp competitor in 2009, back when people still used
Foursquare.

~~~
eigenvector
Maybe 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.

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rcacique
I personally prefer <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.

