Four ways foursquare can improve their tips
One of the best things about foursquare is the tips offered by other users. Unfortunately, finding the most useful tips on foursquare can be quite a pain. Here are four things foursquare can to do make tips more useful:
1. Implement a rating system
There are tons of interesting tips in foursquare’s database, but they often get buried by the useless ones. Foursquare already has buttons in place that could be used as a sort of voting system, a la Reddit or Digg.
The “I’ve done this!” and “ignore” buttons are already able to provide a rating for every tip. Tips that more users have marked “I’ve done this” should be floated to the top of the list. More “ignores” should move a tip to the bottom of the list.
By default, the tips for each venue should be sorted by the number of “votes” it’s received, with an option to sort by date for users who prefer to see the newest ones. Useful tips from your friends, or ones that have been rated as useful by your friends, should get the highest priority.
2. Sort tips by their distance from me
When you look at the tips on a brand profile, they’re sorted by the date they were added. Only the 50 (or 25 or 100, depending on the brand) most recent tips are shown. This makes it difficult, if not impossible, to find the tips a brand has left in your city. I’d love to see the tips that the History Channel has left nearby, but without checking every venue in town, there’s currently no way to find them.
Offering the option to sort the tips on branded profile pages by distance (from my current location) would make it easy to see the tips that have been left nearby.
3. Show users’ tips — whether they’re in my city or not
It’s frustrating to go to a user’s profile that says “Total Things Done: 96″ and see “[this user] hasn’t added any tips near [current city] yet.” You then get to play a guessing game, changing your city to locations where you think the user might have left tips.
This list would be much more useful if it was open to everyone — no matter their location — and sorted by distance from my current location.
4. Add the city and state after the venue name
This is a little thing, but adding it would make browsing the lists of tips more useful. For instance, as I look through the list of tips on VH1′s profile, there are lots of places that look like they’d be nice to see a show, but I have no idea where they are. Adding the city and state after the venue name would add a lot more context to the list of tips.
How do you think foursquare could improve their tips system?
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Great additions to the system.. Foursquare really need to improve their website if they’re gonna win the geo-war.
All of these suggestions would be extremely helpful.
I’ve been using Foursquare to find places to eat or sites to see while in a different city on business travel. However, it would be nice if I could see all my friends’ tips from a particular city instead of clicking each friend to see if they’ve left comments nearby.
Or what about being able to search for the most-tipped places nearby? If I’m planning a trip to San Antonio, for instance, and I have no friends there, I still want to know where I should eat, sleep, and explore. Once you move beyond hunting for badges like those from TLC or the History Channel, it’s very difficult to find recommendations from other users. You can’t even randomly click on businesses if you don’t know what to look for in the first place.
RT @aboutfoursquare: Four ways #foursquare can improve their tips http://bit.ly/a1jgAN
Tips from friends should probably get a little bump up on the venue pages. The corporate partners would probably appreciate that, because it will make following them more useful.
Long-long-longterm, Foursquare should be thinking about using accumulated data to sort by similarities. When you look at a venue page, they should be promoting tips that are similar to tips you’ve “done” at other venues. For (a banal) example, if you’ve “done” a lot of tips about “dessert,” Foursquare should figure out you’re really into dessert and give dessert-related tips a boost.
Likewise longterm, the Amazon-approach of “people who bought this also bought that” could be applied to help promote tips up the list.
Unfortunately, sorting-by-similarity isn’t something you can do successfully until you have a lot of data to work with. Foursquare will need to get users using tips more before they can think about using the really advanced sorting methods. Hopefully the baby steps (like the ones listed in this article) will help with that.
Ultimately, the ideal tip-sorting system is one that provides a customized list for each user, without the user having to do anthing “extra” to customize it, because their normal Foursquare use is providing the data about what’s interesting to them. I really hope Foursqare goes that route, instead of just implementing some lame “thumbs up/down” system.
(Tangentially, whenever Foursquare gets around to adding a real “block user” button, I hope it also blocks that user’s tips. That would help get tip-spammers under control, especially if Foursquare follows Twitter’s lead and automatically flags the heavily-blocked tippers for account review.)
RT @aboutfoursquare: Four ways #foursquare can improve their tips. How do you think they could make tips more useful? http://bit.ly/a1jgAN
I really like idea #4. I’ve long for that ability in the tips!
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