Foursquare venue URLs change format
UPDATE: The change described below was rolled back shortly after it was implemented. The new style URLs currently redirect to the old style URLs.
Foursquare today pushed a change to the URL format for venues. They now use the longer hexadecimal IDs found in v2 of the foursquare API.
Foursquare’s old venue URLs were created sequentially in the format foursquare.com/venue/754934. The IDs ranged from 3 to somewhere around 20 million. The new URLs are in the format foursquare.com/v/kings-island-amusement-park/4b5d8b3cf964a520e06029e3.
As you can see, the new foursquare venue URLs also include the name of the venue, presumably so foursquare can realize higher rankings on search engines (words in the URL are a major factor used by Google and others to rank pages). Venues names obviously change occasionally, so foursquare has structured the URLs so that only the final venue ID in the URL is important. The words can change (to anything really) and users will still be redirected to the proper URL.
All old URLs redirect to the proper new URL, so it shouldn’t break any applications or sites that link to foursquare venue pages. Services that asked you to paste a foursquare URL in order to determine the venue ID, however, could break with this change. SU Tools will be updated later today to deal with the new venue IDs.
I’m pretty sure I’ll never remember 41059b00f964a520850b1fe3 as the new ID for San Francisco International Airport (12238 has been committed to my memory for a long time), but if that’s what it takes for foursquare to grow, I guess I can live with it.
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One word…. Ew.
1. it just looks messy, when most other sites are trying to shorten URL’s.
2. This is gonna completely screw up all SU tools.
3. thats just annoying…
One word…. Ew.
1. it just looks messy, when most other sites are trying to shorten URL’s.
2. This is gonna completely screw up all SU tools.
3. thats just annoying…
there’s a big hiccup after this change on Asian language venues right now. URL turns foreign languages into question marks and render it inaccessible..
Yes, and they seem to have roll back to the previous numeric ID.
i’m confused right now, seems they got back to the old venues url
guess they pulled it. it messes up all non-English venue.
hi!
thank you for updating us with this new feature.
i would consider that:
1) foursquare always seemed to me a clean place, where SEOs do not put their knowledges too much. this updates sound me spammy (just imagine some SEO/SMO suggesting to put keywords into venue name for url optimization!)
2) some talk about better indexing of venues with this new url format. but i saw like some venues have robots noindex in their code, and some not. i can’t realize the criteria upon this (i hope not to be a stupid question).
3) and if we give for sure that foursquare wants to improve its S.E. ranking, i think he must fight with google maps listing and facebook places listings. however are there any search engine traffic data for foursquare, in order to see if they are really growing up from this side afetr this change?
5) api v2 already introduced the long id. will this news url kill some extension or external app in the next future in your opinion?
thank you in advance,
andrea (from italy)
sorry, i had to write item 4), not 5) ^^’
So has anyone come across a QR code generator that can take these new venue IDs and generate a “foursquare://” QRcode ?
This seems to be a problem for all qr code generators, they all want you to use the short numerical version of the venue id if you want to create a qr code for check in via the phone foursquare application.
It just needs to be something that creates a QR of a foursquare:// URL, whatever that is, so that the app can launch to that venue’s page for checkin, without having the extra step of searching. Might help cut down on duplicates, too.
The foursquare:// URL scheme works on the iPhone, but not the other platforms. Whatever they create needs to work for all the platforms (or at least the big three) to be effective.
The URI formats to use for QR codes are explained on https://developer.foursquare.com/client/
The problem is that they want you to use the Android intents. It works great on Android, but falls back to the mobile site on iOS, which is a far-less-than-elegant solution.
That’s iOS’s fault, not Foursquare’s. Android Intents let an app call “dibs” on subsets of URI schemes (in this case, the Foursquare mobile website URI), but in iOS, it’s all or nothing — an iOS app has to claim ALL http URIs, or none of them. Two discussions of this contrast:
http://devblog.bu.mp/ios-vs-android-from-the-trenches
http://stackoverflow.com/questions/5630874/is-there-android-intent-concept-in-iphone-sdk
(I think the only way around that limitation would be for Foursquare to build a barcode scanner into the iOS app, so that it doesn’t have to pass URIs through iOS. That’s probably more work than Foursquare wants to do for a still rare usage scenario.)