Archive for category Foursquare FAQ

“If I check in on foursquare, will everyone know where I am?” is probably the most frequent question I get from people when I tell them about foursquare, but somehow I’ve never managed to write an answer to it here on the blog. Consider this post my attempt to correct that.

The short answer is “No!”

As a location-based service, foursquare is keenly aware of the privacy impact of sharing your location. That’s why they’ve gone to great lengths to give users plenty of options to control their location information.

The most important part is that your foursquare check-ins are shared only with your foursquare friends. No one else is able to see where you are, because your check-ins are never posted on your public profile. Foursquare users tend to have a much tighter circle of friends than you’d typically find on Facebook. You should only friend people you trust to know your location, like close friends and family members — not that guy you talked to once in high school.

Foursquare check-ins require that you pull out your phone and explicitly click a few buttons to check in. In no way does it track your location and share it automatically with your friends or anyone else. If you don’t want anyone to know you’re at a particular place, it’s as simple as not checking in. I do this often at places like my kids’ school, for instance.

Each time you check in, you have the option to share that check-in with Facebook or Twitter (I recommend you turn it off by default) if you’re at a particularly interesting place that you’d like to share with a wider audience. Those check-ins (and only those check-ins) are shared with your wider circle of Facebook friends or publicly on Twitter. This is completely optional, and there’s no reason you ever need to share with Facebook or Twitter.

Beyond that, you always have the option to create a completely private check-in that’s not shared with anyone, even your foursquare friends. You are the only person who can see those check-ins. They appear in your private foursquare history, influence your recommendations (these are the number one reason you should be on foursquare!), and make you eligible for a special if one is offered, but aren’t seen by anyone else.

The only time that a location you’ve visited appears on your public profile is if you become Mayor (the person who’s checked in the most over 60 days). It shows you visit a place often, but doesn’t give away your real-time location. You can always opt out of mayorships completely, or remove particular ones from your profile if you’re not comfortable with it appearing publicly.

As you can see, foursquare doesn’t take privacy lightly. There’s no reason to worry that your location will be shared beyond your close circle of friends, unless you explicitly choose to do otherwise.

If you have any more questions about privacy on foursquare, they’ve put together an excellent Privacy 101 page and a grid that explains all the privacy options.

For users accustomed to the old foursquare leaderboard (I’m told there are some people who actually paid attention to it), the most confusing part of the new leaderboard is that it no longer resets at midnight each Monday. Point totals are now calculated over the previous seven days — down to the second.

That rolling seven day period can make it seem like your points are disappearing. In reality, they’re just falling out of that window.

Under the new system, your points — and those of your friends — can change on a minute-by-minute basis. The change makes the leaderboards more dynamic and fun. It’s now impossible for someone to get an insurmountable lead on Monday morning and dominate the rest of the week without checking in on a regular basis.

PS. Given all the possible combinations of points, what are the odds that three people would be tied on my leaderboard with the same high point total?

Now that foursquare shows you how many days you are from becoming the mayor, I see this question pretty often. There are a lot of reasons foursquare could say you’re always one day away, including:

• You’re checking in “off the grid” — A checkin can only earn a mayorship if it’s shared with your friends by selecting “yes” under the “share with friends” setting. If you select “no,” foursquare considers it an “off the grid” checkin and — as a privacy feature — doesn’t award the mayorship to keep from inadvertently revealing your location.
• You don’t have a profile picture — Foursquare doesn’t allow “faceless” mayors, so you’ll need to upload a profile picture on your foursquare settings page in order to earn mayorships.
• You’re using the mobile web — To prevent cheating, foursquare doesn’t allow mobile web checkins to count toward mayorships. You’ll need to use one of foursquare’s smartphone apps since those include GPS verification, something that’s not available on the mobile website.
• You’re in a dead heat — It’s possible the current mayor is matching your checkins. Even if you’re checking in every day, the current mayor could be checking in after you and upping their count by one. You need one more checkin than they have in order to oust them.

In addition, if it’s your first checkin at a venue with no mayor, foursquare will say you need one more checkin to become mayor. You must have two or more checkins (in a 60 day period) in order to be eligible for mayorship.

If you perform a search on the foursquare website, it will automatically search for results near your current city. If you’re planning to go somewhere else, though, changing your foursquare location will let you search in that area instead.

To change your location, simply click your current location at the right of the top blue bar on each page on the foursquare site. It will turn into a text box where you can enter the location you want to search and hit enter. Foursquare will now search within that city instead.

This is also useful if you want to see the tips a user has left in another city, since foursquare only displays tips on user profile pages if they’re near your current location.

For the past few months, foursquare users have been able to associate a link with tips they leave. It’s a great way to share a link to an events calendar, a menu or an article about a venue. Unfortunately, the new design has made it a little more difficult. The new box on each venue page that makes it easy to add tips doesn’t offer an option to add a link.

Luckily, the old system for adding tips is still active. You can access it via the “Add Things” link at the top of every page or by adding the venue ID to the end of this URL:

http://foursquare.com/add_tip?vid=

The links you add are available from the venue page on the foursquare website and from the mobile apps. In the iPhone app, at least, there’s no way to know there’s a link attached to a tip until you actually click on the tip. I usually add a [LINK] pointer at the end of the tip so other users will know there’s a link included.

I also try to make sure the link is to content that’s mobile compatible. An iPhone user, for instance, is going to get annoyed if you send them a link to a Flash video.

Foursquare users often create venues using their mobile devices and then wait until they get back to a desktop computer to enter the full venue information like address and phone number. In yesterday’s design update, a key part of that process was lost: the edit button. There is a workaround, however, that works — at least for now.

Under the old design, users who created a venue or became the mayor of one could click a pencil icon to edit the venue information. Under the new design, that button no longer exists and the “Edit Venue” link only appears for superusers.

If you’re not a superuser, you can still edit the venue information for venues you’ve created or are mayor of by adding “/edit” to the end of the venue URL, like this:

http://foursquare.com/venue/481909/edit

You’ll be taken to the “Super User editing tools” page, where you can choose “edit venue details” to add the address, phone number or Twitter account.

DISCLAIMER: This trick works as of this writing, but it’s possible foursquare plans to disable editing ability for anyone who’s not a superuser. The title of the page — “Super User editing tools” — hints that editing may move solely into the hands of superusers. In my opinion, that would be a mistake; regular users are used to having the ability to correct information they’ve added on a mobile device and removing it could have some ugly consequences when it comes to keeping foursquare’s database clean.

UPDATE (2:40 pm): Foursquare has updated the new venue pages again and the “Edit Venue” link now appears at the top of the page for anyone eligible to edit the venue. They’ve also fixed the “Claim here” links so they now point to the proper claim page.

Foursquare has been notoriously silent on exactly what constitutes a valid venue. In fact, their latest official response is that “users can add any venue (within reason) that has location and actually exists.” “Within reason” was later clarified to mean “no vulgar venues, no venues that don’t have location (ie “state of mind”), no venues that don’t actually exist.”

That sort of “Wild West,” anything goes attitude has left many users frustrated as their nearby venues list gets cluttered with couches, bathrooms and pants. As one user put it, “I don’t want Foursquare to become the MySpace of checkin services…After the hype died down, MySpace experienced a population crash because (in part) the non-freak users got tired of the freakshow and started fleeing to better-managed sites like Facebook and LinkedIn.”

If foursquare wants to continue being the darling of big business, at some point they must draw a line with these ridiculous venues and start closing them down. Here are my opinions on the types of venues that foursquare should eliminate if they want to be taken seriously and keep their honest users engaged:

• Bathrooms and individual bathroom stalls
• Entire towns or cities
• Roads
• Individual seats or sections in a stadium, theater, etc.
• Specific tables in a restaurant
• Rooms and pieces of furniture within homes
• Individual desks, cubicles or offices within a business
• Flights, planes, etc.
• All the ridiculous, offensive venues like “Your Mom’s House” and “Some Dirty Hooker’s Vagina“

In addition, foursquare must make homes private so that they can only be seen by a user’s friends. They’ve been talking about it for months — it’s even a nonfunctional checkbox on the add venue page. It’s becoming a growing privacy and clutter concern that needs to be dealt with soon.

What kinds of venues do you think should be banned from foursquare?

We’ve written about this once before, but yesterday Foursquare’s community manager commented on that post with a key piece of the Facebook/Foursquare puzzle that we were missing. If you’re having trouble getting your Foursquare checkins to post to Facebook, try these steps:

1. Connect your Foursquare and Facebook accounts by visiting your settings page on Foursquare. If they’re already connected, unlink them by clicking “change” and relink them. You can set the default options for updating your Facebook stream with checkins, badges and mayorships however you choose. When the accounts are unlinked, they look like this:
   

   When they are linked, they should look like this:
   

2. Check your Facebook permissions by clicking “Account” in the top right of your Facebook profile and going to “Application Settings.” Click “Edit Settings” next to Foursquare (you may need to set the “show” dropdown at the top to “Authorized” if Foursquare isn’t showing in your list of recently used applications). On the “Additional Permissions” tab, make sure both “Access my data when I’m not using the application” and “Publish content to my wall” are checked. These are both necessary for Foursquare to be able to publish your checkins.
   
3. When you check in, make sure you’re sharing your location with Facebook. Each app does this a little differently. In the iPhone app (below), make sure the “f” box shows a blue background; tap to turn it on if it does not. These settings default to what you’ve set for the “Update my stream when I check in” checkbox on your settings page. You can override that default at any time from the checkin screen.

Let us know in the comments if these steps work for you.