The new feature allows users to copy and paste hours from the venue’s website, which are then automatically parsed by Foursquare to match their format. It’s a huge improvement over the old method of adding hours, which required entering each different time period manually.

Over the weekend, I tried to stump the system and only found one out of 20 that Foursquare wasn’t able to parse correctly, and even then it was very easy to see what went wrong and correct the problem so Foursquare could understand it. Foursquare even threw an error when the hours were far outside those where people normally check in.

Any user can suggest hours for a venue by visiting the venue page and clicking the “show more” link and then “add hours.” Edits from higher level superusers are added immediately, while those added by lower level users must be approved by a superuser (in the address changes queue).

By making it very easy for users to add the hours for venues, it’s clear Foursquare wants more data on the hours venues are actually open. They are already able to provide pretty good guesses based on check-in patterns at each venue, but this gives them concrete data that helps to make Explore results even more accurate.

Have you tried adding hours for a venue? What do you think of this new system?

/Thanks to Ryan Wallace for the tip!

Now that Facebook has completed the rollout of their new Timeline design to all users, it’s time to take a look at Foursquare’s new section that appears on your Timeline (it first launched a few months ago, when Facebook began the rollout). It highlights all your activity on Foursquare that’s been shared to Facebook.

The box features five tabs:

• Recent Check-ins: shows the most recent check-ins you’ve shared to Facebook. Like all the tabs, it’s highly visual, so you’ll see either a picture you added at the location or one from another user.
• Top Places: shows the top places where you’ve shared check-ins to Facebook.
• Map: a map of all your Foursquare check-ins (that have been shared to Facebook)
• Badges unlocked: shows the most recent badges you unlocked before Foursquare stopped sharing them to Facebook. It appears this section is no longer being updated.
• Recently saved: this shows any tips or lists you’ve saved on Foursquare.

This full box appears on your About page, while a smaller version appears on the right side of the Timeline itself. The small box shows just your recent check-ins.

Your friends can choose the “show all” button at any point to be taken to a page dedicated to the Foursquare app that shows more check-ins, saves, etc.

Like other application boxes, the Foursquare box can be hidden or moved to a different position on the page by clicking the pencil icon in the upper right corner and choosing “Edit Sections.” Uncheck Foursquare to hide it completely or drag it up and down to move it on the page. It can be placed anywhere below the About, Photos and Friends boxes.

To delete any of the items that appear in the Foursquare section, click the pencil icon and choose Activity Log. From there you can delete them, hide them from your profile or change their visibility (friends, public, etc.).

Despite the lack of updated badge activity, Foursquare’s new box is a great way to show off your Foursquare activity on your Facebook profile.

What do you think of the new box?

Menus entered or updated by business managers on Locu will be published to Foursquare in real time. They’ll also be passing along updates to hours, phone numbers and addresses as owners make them in an effort to keep Foursquare’s venue data more up-to-date.

Locu also has support for price lists for places like dry cleaners and hair salons. Those aren’t currently supported by Foursquare, but they’re working to make them available soon.

The new menus join those already contributed by SinglePlatform.

Adding more menus can only help Foursquare in their efforts to unseat Yelp in local search. They’re a perfect way to quickly compare a few places to see what they offer without having to visit — and navigate — each website individually.

Strangely, Foursquare’s Explore searches still don’t include menu information when searching for a specific item. That could make it even more useful when searching for a specific item that may not appear in the tips at a venue.

What do you think of the addition?

Foursquare has added a series of advanced filtering options to the desktop version of Explore to make it easy to narrow your results down to exactly the right place.

Using buttons at the top of the screen, you can now filter by:

• Whether or not you’ve been to the place before
• Whether the place is currently open or not
• The price range
• Places your friends have been
• Places with specials

These are more in-depth than the filters previously available and can be combined in a wide variety of ways. Foursquare says they’re working to add more filters and bring them to the mobile apps soon.

What do you think of the new filters? What else would you like to be able to filter on?

The first email welcomes users back once they’ve returned home after a trip. It lists the places they visited on the trip, focusing on those that are short on tips. The call to action urges users to leave their own tips for other users to find.

A second email targets users who are the first of their friends to check in at a place. It, too, asks them to leave a tip for their friends to see.

Check-ins are Foursquare’s “secret sauce” that power their recommendations, but when it comes to convincing someone to actually go to a place, nothing is more powerful than tips/reviews. This effort is a good way for Foursquare to reach out at the right time and try to collect more of them to help future users make a more educated decision.

Have you gotten one of these or a similar email recently? What do you think of the effort?

It’s been a long time since Foursquare redesigned their venue pages. As the mobile apps and mobile web site have evolved to match the things people use Foursquare for today, the website itself has been stuck in November 2011. New features have been shoehorned in, but the pages failed to show visitors — some 50 million of them a month — the true power of Foursquare’s check-in-based data.

With the new venue pages Foursquare is rolling out today, they’re hoping to capture more of those visitors from Google and turn them into Foursquare users. Foursquare’s new front door highlights some of their unique features and becomes a useful landing page with all the pertinent information a visitor needs to decide to visit a venue.

Like Foursquare’s mobile apps, the new pages make photos a top priority, giving users an at-a-glance view to judge a venue. The map becomes secondary, finally moving to a square box on the right-hand side (that’s expandable for a better view).

Venue details — including a condensed view of today’s hours (with an option to see more) — appear next. The business’s logo, menu, pricing details and sharing options are available. Foursquare’s social knowledge comes into play below the venue details, showing which of your friends have visited a place, and — more importantly — how often. You’ll also see whether they liked the place or not.

Down the right sidebar, Foursquare makes use of the data gleaned from 3.5 billion check-ins, showing places similar to the current venue and places people often go next. This is a great opportunity for Foursquare to differentiate themselves from Yelp and Google Places, offering a unique data set designed at providing recommendations instead of just listings.

With this update, Foursquare has finally made tips searchable, making it easy to find exactly what you’re looking for in a long list of tips. This is especially helpful when you click a highlighted term in the “People talk about” box since it narrows the tips list to just ones mentioning that item.

And for those of you who use Foursquare for its old gaming aspects, you’ll still find the mayor of each venue listed… at the very bottom of the right hand column.

The new venue pages are meant to capitalize on the 50 million visitors to Foursquare’s website each month — compared to just 33 million users — many of whom find their way via Google search results. By better showing these visitors how they’re able to use check-in data to better make recommendations, Foursquare hopes to convert them to regular Foursquare users.

What do you think of the new venue pages?

The tool offers four views of your check-ins from the past year:

• Time: Your check-ins are grouped by category and shown linearly on a timeline from last April to today.
• Category: Check-ins are grouped by category.
• Connections: This view shows the connections between your check-ins. A line is drawn from each place to the place you visited next. Rolling over a place highlights its connections with others, with darker lines for the most common occurrences.
• Random: A random jumble of check-in icons.

In any of the views, mousing over one of the icons shows the name and date of that particular check-in. Categories are color-coded to make them easy to differentiate.

Foursquare’s new tools is a neat way to visualize your check-ins and better understand the relationships between them. This is exactly the kind of thing Foursquare is doing in their Explore algorithms to determine places to recommend — except those are over the full range of Foursquare users — but in a unique visual way that makes it easier to understand.

What do you think of the tool?

Foursquare has recently implemented the same thing, offering “Did you mean…” suggestions for commonly misspelled words. Tapping or clicking the link changes your query to the properly spelled term. It a nice little feature Foursquare has added to help to make sure you’re finding exactly what you’re looking for.

The suggestions currently appear on the desktop version of Explore and the newly updated iOS app, but don’t appear in the Android app yet. They’ll likely make their way there in the next update.

What do you think of the “Did you mean…” suggestions?

Building an app like Foursquare takes a tremendous number of engineers, so the company needs additional funding — on top of the $50 million raised in 2011 — to continue to grow. In a blog post, CEO Dennis Crowley said:

The stuff we’re building takes a lot of work. Look at yesterday’s big update, for example. The most amazing thing about it is that it tells you interesting things around you, anywhere in the world, the second you open the app. That’s not easy. We have to crunch your 3,500,000,000 check-ins, layer your social data over it, semantically analyze our tens of millions of tips, and take a look at real-time activity around you. We do all that in under a second, all to recommend two or three places that are perfect for you.

They’ll also be expanding their sales force — currently just 10 people — to 40 by this summer as they try to prove out their business model with more advertisers. Up to now, the company has limited the promoted updates they launched last year with a small group of about 50, mostly large companies like Walgreens and Toys R Us. They’ve previously said the tests are going well, since Foursquare is in a unique position to track the customer from ad to check-in and, in some cases, to the sale.

With a larger sales force, the company will be able to sell more companies on both their ad product and credit card offers for Visa and Mastercard customers. Crowley also tells Bloomberg that ads could expand to consumer packaged goods companies, offering companies like Samsung the opportunity to advertise their products when you check in at Best Buy.

The financing comes in the form of a loan from the Silver Lake Waterman growth debt fund, as well as convertible debt from Foursquare’s existing investors (Andreessen Horowitz, O’Reilly AlphaTech Ventures, Spark Capital, and Union Square Ventures). Since it’s debt, the company can delay the question of valuation for a bit. Many observers had predicted a down round for Foursquare given their slow revenue growth and the cooling market in the wake of the Facebook IPO.

According to Union Square Ventures partner Fred Wilson, convertible debt was an ideal option for Foursquare and their investors in this round:

In the Foursquare situation, the convertible debt was purchased by a group of insiders led by USV and Andreeesen Horowitz. Both of our firms have been investors in Foursquare for several rounds and both of us own a meaningful stake in the company. Valuation is somewhat immaterial to us as our stake in the company is not going to increase much in this round of financing. But valuation is very material to the Foursquare management team because $41mm of capital is going to be dilutive at any valuation that would make sense here.

So the optimal structure is convertible debt. That means this round is not dilutive to the Foursquare management at this time. But it will be dilutive when the debt converts into equity, most likely at the next equity issuance. For the investors, we get the comfort of knowing that eventually our investment will become equity and we will not have to price it. Someone else will.

With more funding, the questions about acquisition (or, according to PrivCo, closing) are delayed. Foursquare gets more time to prove that what they’re building is a viable business model that advertisers are willing to adopt, much like Google did when they revolutionized web search.

Foursquare’s final badge unlock tweet

Much of Foursquare’s early viral growth was tied to their automatic tweeting and posting of badges and mayorships. Followers couldn’t miss the tweets from their friends and eventually grew curious enough to sign up for Foursquare on their own.

Over time, though, those automatic messages got annoying to everyone on Twitter or Facebook who didn’t use Foursquare (and even many of those who did).

As of last week, Foursquare has disabled automatic badge and mayorship messages on both Facebook and Twitter. While the automatic messages have been disabled, Foursquare says Facebook and Twitter posts about these achievements aren’t gone for good:

We are working on giving people ways to share the moments that really matter to them, rather than automatically sharing everything.

For now, the only tweets and Facebook posts Foursquare allows are shared check-ins, venues, lists and tips — all items that can be shared manually from the apps. They’re also items that further Foursquare’s local search ambitions instead of promoting a “mistake” from their past.

As Foursquare made clear in their update earlier today, local search is their future. They continually fight a battle, however, to convince potential users that they’re not just about badges and mayorships anymore. You can see how constant tweets about those aspects could damage Foursquare’s efforts to reverse the perception.

What do you think? Will you miss the automated tweets and Facebook posts about the badges you earn?