Instagram Dropping Foursquare for Facebook Places

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."

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.

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.

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.

No wonder I was not able to find newly opened restaurants and some local spots which were available before the auto-update.