
How the World Looks to Your Phone - anand-s
http://engineering.foursquare.com/2015/07/02/how-the-world-looks-to-your-phone/
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deanCommie
Does anyone still use Foursquare? I was part of a wave of users when everyone
I knew was checking in, and trying to earn badges, and race to the top of the
weekly charts. In it's heyday, it was almost as popular as Draw Something's
peak among my developer friends.

Now? I don't know anyone that uses it.

And the weird thing is, the FEATURES that it offers (menu recommendations,
localized pictures) are still great and way better than showing up to some
place and trying to find it on Yelp or Google Maps. And yet...I never use it.

I know some would blame the split of the app into two, but most people I knew
abandoned Foursquare long before that.

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ourmandave
_Does anyone still use Foursquare?_

The real question is, does Foursquare still use you?

(If you're not paying for it you're the product.)

~~~
cbd1984
> (If you're not paying for it you're the product.)

Yep, that's _precisely_ how GNU Emacs and Linux work.

(I hate trite sayings.)

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amelius
Why does every advertisement of a web technology nowadays seem to involve
coffee and bagels?

~~~
20kleagues
because that is what engineers use as fuel :)

~~~
ansgri
Here's the better fuel: tea and bananas. Actually Pepsi instead of tea today,
but only because I'm in a hurry.

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eridal
> _So what does Foursquare do? Well, _our users_ have crawled the world _for
> us_ and _have told us_ more than 7 billion times where _they’re_ standing
> and what that place is called. _Each time they do_, we attach a little bit
> more data _to our models_ about how those places look _to our phones out_ in
> the real world. _To our phones_, the world looks like this:_

(emphasis mine)

Isn't just me or Foursquare thinks that your phone, running their software,
belongs to them?

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AndrewKemendo
No, they probably think that the data that you generate from their software,
running on your phone, belongs to them. Which is true.

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chinathrow
True in practice, but not so true in other countries. Data generated by the
end user belongs to them.

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AndrewKemendo
I would imagine that it is dependent on TOS.

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chinathrow
Depends. Sometimes ownership of data is bound by law - by ToS you can give
away some usage rights such as to use/modify/sell/whatnot.

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EGreg
Our app coming out won't have to deal with these issues.

And yet it will be able to connect people with places.

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rtpg
How did foursquare work at the beginning? Obviously they didn't have as much
data then..

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tomedme
Before they split off into 2 apps? Data went to them, not the other way round.

