I’m a big fan of mobile social network FourSquare. It’s a very versatile service, but here’s a quick list of what FourSquare offers its users:
1) A mobile social network that allows you to broadcast your location to your friends and see where your friends are. You can check in from anywhere you want on FourSquare but public places are most popular.
2) A game that rewards you with points and badges for checking in at bars and restaurants, and lets you compete with friends
3) A personal record of all the bars and restaurants that you’ve visited (hat tip: Charlie O’Donnell)
4) A directory of all the bars and restaurants near your current location
5) A social recommendation service for restaurants, bars, and other cool spots to check out.
The recommendation service is what’s most valuable to me. When I open up FourSquare it automatically determines my location. In addition to seeing a list of nearby bars and restaurants, I can view specific “tips” and “to-do’s” — think: recommendations — for places nearby.
For example, if you get out of the subway at the Christopher Street in the West Village and open up FourSquare, here are some of the tips that you’ll see:
Sure, its possible to visit Yelp.com on your computer and find the best restaurants in a neighborhood before you go there. But when you find yourself hungry or thirsty in a random neighborhood, its great to have these recommendations on demand on the phone. Being able to filter the FourSquare community’s tips so that I only see my friend’s tips is a great feature. When I’m deciding where to go, nothing could be more relevant than finding out that one of my friend’s favorite restaurants is a few hundred feet away that there is one dish that is better than everything else on the menu. FourSquare delivers this relevance with only a few clicks.
The quality of the tips generated by the Foursquare community is very good, but ultimately it’s the content delivery method — mobile, location-aware, sorted by distance and social relevance — that’s most valuable to me. Being able to pull in tips from favorite external sources, like Thrillist, Daily Candy, Chowhound, Serious Eats, Urban Daddy, would make FourSquare even better. I would love to see FourSquare act as a platform where I can subscribe to specific review publishers and access their content (free or paid) into the Foursquare interface.
Most tips are as brief as a tweet, which is a much better length for mobile consumption than your average multi-paragraph restaurant review. But I could easily imagine an ecosystem where it is profitable for publishers to reformat their content for consumption in the FourSquare interface. Without any hesitation, I would pay a $20 one time fee to have the full archive of Thrillist reviews accessible in FourSquare. I have hundreds and hundreds of historic Thrillist e-mails archived in my Gmail that provide zero value to me and probably aren’t providing much revenue for Thrillist, assuming that most of their ad revenue comes through daily e-mail blasts as opposed to the historic content on their website. Reformatting reviews for mobile consumption would unlock a lot of value for both me and Thrillist.
I would also love the ability to pull in the restaurants that my friends and I tag on Delicious. This is rich information that would be much more valuable if I could easily accesss it in the FourSquare format: mobile, location-aware, sorted by distance and social relevance.