I love Foursquare. I love the friendly competition. I love reading the tips at locations that I check into so I can discover things that perhaps I didn’t know about that place. I am proud to be mayor of so many places. And I love the badges, of course! But there is also another side of Foursquare that I don’t like. Little things that just bug me, or that I wish would be included in the product.
As a point of information, I use the latest Foursquare app for Android which came out 12/6/2010. I have seen some good improvements every time the app is updated, but there are still some things that I ‘wish’ for. If I am mistaken about any of this, please make a comment so I can correct it.
1. The initial list of places bugs me – listed at the top of my ‘places’ list is my local pharmacy, and it is listed as one of ‘my favorites’. The problem is that it isn’t. I never flagged it as a favorite, and I am actually not even sure how you do that. In fact, I have only checked-in there maybe once?? Also, my most visited places never shows up. Sometimes a few of them will show up, but not all of them. I mean, I visit a certain handful of them… every… single… day. Foursquare knows this. You would think that they would literally show up as my ‘favorites’, but they never, ever do. That is just dumb. Fix this please.
2. Search has gotten worse – because my most visited places don’t always show up on my place list, I have to search for them. In the previous version of the app I could open up the menu and choose ‘search’, which would then take me to a search field where I could search for what I am looking for. Now it takes me to another screen that lists some places and I have to hit the menu button again and hit ‘search’ again. That is double the work to perform a search. Why is this???
3. Homescreen widget – I have the Droid Incredible by HTC. I love the ability to put Android (and HTC) widgets on my various homescreens (I have 7 of them). However, I only have 1 Foursquare widget available to me, which shows me a list of my last 5 friends’ check-ins. While that is useful information, I already get an email on my phone every time someone checks-in somewhere. So this widget is overkill for me. I would like a homescreen widget that allows me with 1 press to ‘check-in’ to my most visited places. This would be awesome.
4. Buzz me baby – I would like for my app to buzz on my phone when certain things happen. For example, if I am near a place that one of my friends has checked into, I would like my phone to let me know. If I touch down in a new city, I would like my phone to let me know that, because of the history of where I eat at home, I would probably enjoy a meal at this place or that place. I would like to be buzzed when a nearby place has a special. I realize that these things I want may not be possible with the level of GPS integration that we have right now on our phones, but hey, this is MY Christmas list, so don’t be a buzz kill.
5. Let me see who is there – it would be great if I could see who is checked-in at a place before I check-in. For example, if there is a game tonight it would be nice if, as I was driving by the place, I could see who was checked-in. And I am not just talking about my Foursquare friends, I am talking about everyone who uses Foursquare. That might persuade me to go to the game if I knew who was there, plus I could discover new friends that way. And again, I don’t want to have to check-in to do it.
6. Let me be a super-user – Gowalla has a nice feature that allows certain Gowalla users to be ‘Street Team Elites’. These STEs have the ability to correct incorrect information that they see on a venue, as well as get rid of duplicate venues. Foursquare supposedly has the same thing called a “Superuser”. I have the Foursquare ‘Superuser’ badge, but I can’t edit venues, so this badge obviously has nothing to do with it. Yes, I can edit the details of a venue that I created, but there are too many venues that need fixing. I can help, if I am allowed to.
7. Get rid of the junk – there are too many duplicate venues in Foursquare because newbies to the service start creating new places everywhere they go if they don’t mind the venue listed on their places list. (read #1 above please). These people also are too lazy to search so they perpetuate these duplicate venues. If you click the ‘add venue’ button, Foursquare should force you to search for your venue first to see if it already exists. That would be such a simple fix. I have flagged duplicate venues many times but nothing ever seems to happen. I wonder if anyone is even looking at those flagged venues??
So there you have it. I don’t ask for much, right? Santa, are you listening? Or more importantly, Dennis Crowley and Naveen Selvadurai, are you listening?
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Misspelled words… don’t get me started. Thanks for ‘checking in’!!
Well done, Steve. I especially agree on the junk. I would be glad to help the fourquare people out by cleaning up the duplicate venues. Let’s also not forget about the misspelled words. Those really bug me. Keep up the good work!.
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