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Foursquare Open Source Places: A new foundational dataset

simonwillison.net

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Re: Foursquare Open Source Places: A new foundational dataset

#24

Post by freyfogle »

nunodonato wrote: post #16
jillesvangurp wrote: post #11

I used to work for Nokia Maps (before it was renamed Here Maps) working on their places registry, which was a proprietary data set compiled from various sources of data with a similar amount of places. It was really messy data. Lots of duplicates, lots of stale data, lots of misleading data (e.g. hotels claiming to be right on the beach that in reality were a few kilometers away), etc. Part of my job was cleaning tha…

I remember the good old time of Foursquare. What caused its downfall? The checkin thing was quite nice, I even remember some places offering discounts or having special offers to checked in visitors or mayors. Its one of those apps that could still have a vibrant community 10 years later.

Not enough people wanted to check in. Those that did were all of the same demographic. So lots of check-ins at bars / restaurants, none at "boring" shops., doctor's office, etc. Then, like any fad, checking in was no longer fun or cool.

Re: Foursquare Open Source Places: A new foundational dataset

#25

Post by jeduardo »

nunodonato wrote: post #16
jillesvangurp wrote: post #11

I used to work for Nokia Maps (before it was renamed Here Maps) working on their places registry, which was a proprietary data set compiled from various sources of data with a similar amount of places. It was really messy data. Lots of duplicates, lots of stale data, lots of misleading data (e.g. hotels claiming to be right on the beach that in reality were a few kilometers away), etc. Part of my job was cleaning tha…

I remember the good old time of Foursquare. What caused its downfall? The checkin thing was quite nice, I even remember some places offering discounts or having special offers to checked in visitors or mayors. Its one of those apps that could still have a vibrant community 10 years later.

I remember a significant redesign and a lot of features moved to Swarm, which had a different kind of social push. I remember the app losing its usefulness to me and Swarm not being something I wanted to use. Details are hazy, though, it's been a long while.

Re: Foursquare Open Source Places: A new foundational dataset

#27

Post by tauntz »

nunodonato wrote: post #16
jillesvangurp wrote: post #11

I used to work for Nokia Maps (before it was renamed Here Maps) working on their places registry, which was a proprietary data set compiled from various sources of data with a similar amount of places. It was really messy data. Lots of duplicates, lots of stale data, lots of misleading data (e.g. hotels claiming to be right on the beach that in reality were a few kilometers away), etc. Part of my job was cleaning tha…

I remember the good old time of Foursquare. What caused its downfall? The checkin thing was quite nice, I even remember some places offering discounts or having special offers to checked in visitors or mayors. Its one of those apps that could still have a vibrant community 10 years later.

I was an early user of Foursquare and also tried to contribute fixes back when the Foursquare Android app was still open source(!).

From a end-user's perspective, it was perfect! It was gamified just enough to be engaging but not so much that it would become annoying or a grind. It was tied to the real-world via restaurants and other places offering special discounts when you "checked-in" or became the mayor of a place. It had people contributing essentially-real-time updates to metadata of all places (opening hours, location, description, phone numbers, images, etc) - way before Google Maps user contributions were really a thing. It had a social network aspect to it that actually worked etc etc..

It pains me that Foursquare, the company, failed to figure out how to actually monetize any of this and keep the thing going that made them popular.. so they grasped as straws and did the whole app split thing (WTH, really) and the community just faded out as far as I can tell.

Re: Foursquare Open Source Places: A new foundational dataset

#30

Post by itissid »

nunodonato wrote: post #16
jillesvangurp wrote: post #11

I used to work for Nokia Maps (before it was renamed Here Maps) working on their places registry, which was a proprietary data set compiled from various sources of data with a similar amount of places. It was really messy data. Lots of duplicates, lots of stale data, lots of misleading data (e.g. hotels claiming to be right on the beach that in reality were a few kilometers away), etc. Part of my job was cleaning tha…

I remember the good old time of Foursquare. What caused its downfall? The checkin thing was quite nice, I even remember some places offering discounts or having special offers to checked in visitors or mayors. Its one of those apps that could still have a vibrant community 10 years later.

Dennis crowley who led that effort had a difficult time getting his marauder map like vision of the places+people going, not for lack of trying. He was at a NYC event describing his experience. First he tried dogeball which google bought and did not do much with it. He lefy and started FSQ. He mentioned that eventually FSQ pivoted to enterprise as the swarm/checkin like features were not making business sense, it was also copied by FB, Yelp which is when traffic moved away from FSQ's app to those. But FSQ always had a higher committment to location privacy and still does(remember cambridge analytica and all those NYT articles on location tracking)

Dennis is trying something new now, which is true(to him) and to the original vision of Marauder's map and FSQ. He has been on the dogeball train since a long time and hats off to his commitment.

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