Pixelrage.net

Ever since the initial novelty of Foursquare has somewhat left me through my months of using it, I find myself picking at all of the obvious issues the service has. Don’t get me wrong, it’s still a revolutionary idea that is probably going to beat the dead horse this year when everyone and their mother is going to start including “check in” services in their business directory sites and retail stores, but there are serious fundamental flaws with it so far.

1. The GPS technology is WAY off.

Why is it that when I open up Foursquare at home, I’m seeing storefronts 15 miles away in search results? It doesn’t make much sense to me when I can check in to a restaurant in downtown New York City from my bedroom in Jersey. That kind of defeats the purpose. Another thing that is really annoying is how a particular place is listed in Foursquare, but refuses to trigger when I log in…even when I press “refresh.” I’ll have to do a manual search in order for it to show up.

2. It’s the Wild West.

Foursquare is too easy to spam. It seems like everywhere I go, I check in by scanning the local area, and see tons of worthless results like “YO MAMMA’S BEDROOM” and “Home” and “Jen’s house.” This is an obvious problem of the general idea of letting the community discover and check in to locations – there will always be a select few who are total airheads, spammers or abusers. The concept worked well with sites like Wikipedia because there was such a strong moderation aspect involved, which isn’t truly the case with Foursquare. The problem is that these garbage entries seem to be permanent fixtures once you include them in the Foursquare system. There’s no “report for abuse” icon on your hand held device.

3. Duplicate entries.

There are way too many situations where I see the same place listed twice in Foursquare. Which one do I go with? The one that has the full title but without the contact information, or the one that has a partial title with a phone number and street address? Which one has been used more often by other Foursquare users? This information simply isn’t provided. I noticed this with my local highway’s rest stop. There are two versions up there, one has “Park & Ride” after the name of the stop (which is the correct title), and the other doesn’t. Both really don’t need to exist: they only do, because some people are too impatient to look for an establishment before adding it to the system.

4. Entries with poor grammar getting ‘established.’

One of the issues with allowing the community to “establish” new locations in Foursquare is that some of them have the grammar of a 3rd grader. For instance, “yankees stadium” (not case sensitive + an unnecessary plural) or “JOES RESTARANT” (all caps + misspelling). The big issue is that this entry tends to become “the” entry for that establishment once it has become the first, and people start checking in to it. From your hand held device, there is no way to edit and correct the entry, which is a grave mistake (at least, that’s how it is on an Android phone). It’s kind of like getting a misspelled tattoo.

5. Getting slapped on the wrist for too many consecutive check-ins.

Foursquare likes to “punish” you if you check into multiple locations within too short of a time interval by denying you badges, points and bonuses. It really doesn’t make much sense in some situations. What if you’re a salesperson on the road? You’ll want to check in a few times within the hour; however, you won’t get any credit due to the “slow down!” warning. I realize that the “power levelers” out there are cheating the system to get points by checking in over and over, but if Foursquare’s GPS technology were a little smarter, it should realize that you actually are at different locations, and not sitting around in the living room checking into 20 establishments within your local radius.

What I’d anticipate for Foursquare in the future:

There’s no doubt that Foursquare is in its infancy, and that a lot is going on to improve it. I’m looking forward to a future where you can walk outside of your local Best Buy, open up Foursquare, and see nothing but Best Buy, and possibly the other little franchise shop that’s 20 steps away from it. Nothing more. Then, you’ll see that the listing is verified, spelled correctly, and has the right information listed within it. Fifteen minutes later, you’ll visit that new hot dog joint that opened up a town away, and add it to the system. It will remain ‘ghosted out’ or ‘grayed’ until verified (by a Foursquare community leader or leaders). When you press a location, it takes you to a page with a thumbnail of the establishment, and map.

There will definitely come a time where we’ll look back many years on Foursquare, and talk about the time when it was unruly and relatively un-moderated…filled with junk entries, and struggling to pull your real location. Until that day, it’s really up to us as tech geeks to make sure our new entries are correct and not already in the system. Spelling and grammar count. Pick up a business card or brochure, and type in the correct street address and cross street, as well as the phone number, and categorize the place correctly. Take your time and put in the effort, and sit back for the day that Foursquare shows what it can really do!