Bizzy, the local recommendation service that pioneered the “check out” last March, is one of my favorite apps. My biggest problem with it is that I always forget to check out after I leave a place. I’m conditioned to checking in on foursquare when I get to places, but when I leave I’m so busy fumbling for car keys, strapping kids in or catching up on Twitter that checking out is the last thing on my mind.

Apparently I’m not the only one with that problem. Bizzy today launched new versions of their iPhone and Android apps that will automatically send you a reminder to check out of places after you’ve checked in there on foursquare. Foursquare users no longer have an excuse for forgetting to check out with Bizzy.

Checking out is how you tell Bizzy whether or not you liked a place. You have three simple choices for rating places: Love it, Meh or No Thanks. You can also leave a comment or photo so your friends will know why you liked a place.

The ratings are how Bizzy knows which places to recommend. Unlike foursquare explore, which is based simply on checkins, Bizzy considers sentiment when recommending a place. Checking in somewhere doesn’t always mean you like it (I check in at the shoe store, for instance, because my wife drags me there, not because I love the place), so Bizzy uses the sentiment you add with check outs to determine whether or not to recommend a place.

When you first connect your account to foursquare, you’ll see a list of places you haven’t checked out from yet on Bizzy. You can add a check out and rating right from that screen.

From then on, Bizzy will send you an alert about an hour after you’ve checked in somewhere to remind you to check out (they get alerted to your checkin thanks to foursquare’s still-officially-in-alpha push API for checkins). They only send alerts when you check out somewhere they think is worth rating, so you won’t get annoyed to check out of the gas station, for example. The reminders will also appear in your Bizzy feed.

“I’m really excited about what Bizzy has done with Foursquare. I am an avid user of both Foursquare and Bizzy, and now I’ll be reminded to check out every time I check in so I can let my friends and followers know the difference between the places I love and the places that are just OK. There’s a high barrier to reviewing a business on most review sites, but Bizzy makes it easy for me – sharing a review takes the same amount of time as sharing a tweet, and I canexpress my sentiments with a tap of a button,” said Mike Schneider, co-author of Location Based Marketing For Dummies.

This update comes just a few weeks after Bizzy made their app more social by allowing users to follow their friends and see their checkouts (and others’ checkouts nearby) in their feeds. They also added “likes” and comments for check outs. You can add places that sound interesting to your “try list,” which will later recommend those places to you when you’re nearby (much like the foursquare to-do list).

I’m excited for the changes in Bizzy. They’re exactly the answer to the problem I had with remembering to check out when I looked at the app last March. Bizzy makes a great complement to foursquare explore; their sentiment-based recommendations always seem to be very good, so I’m looking forward to checking out at more places and getting even better recommendations.

Have you tried Bizzy? What do you think of their recommendations in comparison to foursquare explore?

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