When I first found out that Foursquare was to be released in Australia, I became really excited – not because of what the technology was (all I had heard about the application was from Twitter) but just the fact that a new type of web technology/game was being released outside of the United States.

For those outside of the loop, “Foursquare on your phone gives you & your friends new ways of exploring your city. Earn points & unlock badges for discovering new things” – pretty much you register yourself at a location at a specific time and you earn points for doing so.

I quickly created an account and soon I had a bit of an obsession with the site, as the game component of mayorships kept me competitive. Whenever someone would ask “So what do you get for being the Mayor of a place?” I would rattle off the discounts and other assorted free things you could get. However, the most important part of being Mayor was being the most frequent user because it meant that you were the ‘regular’ at that location, even if there was no tangible prize.

But now after a while, my checkins have dwindled as I have realised that Foursquare may not be living up to the hype that it had initially created. Although Foursquare used to be miles ahead of it’s competitors, recently other location based sites, such as Gowalla, have given the site a run for it’s money. However,  I feel there are some components that are preventing it from being the best that it can be and may assist the site in becoming the major player in the market.

Messy Shopping Centres

Comparing the number of places found between Bondi Westfield and World Square (Two Sydney-based Shopping Centres) shows that even though Bondi Westfield would have many more shops than World Square; World Square has been mapped in more depth. This leads to the question to how much do we detail our locations? In Shopping Centres do we:

• Combine all shops into a single shopping centre entity?
• Identify each shop individually?

To make Foursquare more of a marketing tool for brands and shopping centres, it’s preferable to have all shops mapped within the complex as users could use it a bit like a searchable store map – determining which stores are closest to their location with the GPS capabilities of the Foursquare applications. It is also beneficial in a competitive sense as you can earn the most points for checking in repeatedly and therefore earn a heap of Foursquare badges.

However, using Foursquare can be very time consuming and disruptive activity, and users constantly need to be aware of their surroundings to remember to check in when they go to new locations.  Therefore, it may be a lot easier to implement a single entity for all shopping centres, as users will only need to check into one location for the duration of their time. It also increases the competition of mayorship for these shopping centres, as more users will be registering within the one location.

But I didn’t even go to a Photobooth!

I was checking in at Broadway Shopping Centre one afternoon and a notification popped up stating I had scored the Photobooth badge. The problem was that I had never been to a photobooth at Broadway. I didn’t even know there was a photobooth at Broadway.

Some badges are achieved through checking into locations with a specific tag, such as photobooth or douchebag. If someone tags an shopping centre with one of these tags, regardless of whether the item exists within the complex, people can easily achieve these badges without truly accessing these items. As discussed before, it is better to have an overarching entity for shop than individual stores identified – so unless people are realistically going to these photobooths within shopping centres, it makes these tags redundant.

Random tagging can create inconsistencies within the ‘game’, and although it is possible for Superusers to try and repair any irregularities with tags, usually it is too little too late. After reading my Crowdsourcing book, I know that moderation does not help building online communities, however I think by providing more responsibilities to mayors of locations and only allowing those users to update tags on sites ensures those people who are familiar with the location can provide more accuracy to location tagging.

“You are currently checked into Your House”

One of my biggest gripes with Foursquare is the ability to check into your own house. Your privacy goes absolutely out the window the moment you start checking into a user-defined house, especially as addresses are usually required to ensure that they are displayed in the correct area. It also becomes a massive war against some random if they become the mayor of your own house – because they’ve been over there a few times or you have just forgotten to check in.

The closest thing I do to checking in at home is checking into my suburb – which I guess isn’t that much better, but at least it provides an entire suburb’s worth of security instead of my street, or actual house number. If someone really had something out against someone, having their house location could lead to dire consequences.

I really think Foursquare needs to have some sort of identification for these places and remove them straight away or prevent them from being added as they do need to maintain the security of their users. There’s also a technical benefit to this as well, users homes clog up the location databases; so when someone goes to check into another place, they may be getting Sally’s address at the same time.

“Hmm… no venues found for Broadwau”

Foursquare is pretty fussy when it comes to their location search. One letter incorrect, or words around the wrong way lead to repeated “This location does not exist” messages. Foursquare really needs to improve these searches so users are able to find locations more efficiently when searching and may encourage them to utilise the site to a greater level. It also means a reduced level of redundant locators, such as “University of Technology, Sydney” and “UTS”.

Not Invited to the application party

This is more of a personal whinge, but there is currently no application platform available for Symbian. As I refuse to get an iPhone and my probable next phone (android) isn’t on the cards for another year, I am stuck only with the ability to log in and check in via the mobile web application – which is shockingly bad and slow as it forces the user to download a large image file whenever they access the site. It would be awesome if someone reading this blog who is a technical guru could develop something… please?

At the end of the day, Locations are the future.

However, I think Foursquare is a part of the new guard of social networking apps – in the future there will be an emphasis on location based networking; more than what any of these location apps and Twitter is providing right this second. I think this sort of stuff could be fantastic within an e-commerce environment, especially when providing vouchers and discounts to users – it would be so cool to be able to be within 100m of a store you are interested in and receive a voucher message on your phone!

For more reading about Foursquare, check out Jordan’s post about the potential of it over at Digital Chemistry.

P.S. it has been exactly four months since I last posted – I do apologise for having such a long delay between stopping and starting up blogging again, and I can assure that it won’t be this long between this and my next post