Foursquare Trip Tips

Comments (Archived):

1. 1st – the great thing about Fred travelling West of the Mississippi is that I get a chance to be the first to comment. 2nd – Wife and I just switched to Foursquare, after getting frustrated with Yelp. Have to start getting used to it – sure seems to be the kind of app that the more you use, the more valuable it becomes.

   1. Exactly

2. neat.i’m going to try this for park city.

   1. Troll Hallen Lounge @ Stein Eriksen LodgeEl Chubasco – cheap mexican

3. Excited to try this for my upcoming trip to Barcelona (first time).

   1. http://www.nytimes.com/2015…

      1. Nice one! Thank you 🙂

         1. Don’t walk down las ramblas unless you have your purse handcuffed to you. In fact, just avoid that street entirely.The laneways and squares are incredible though.

   2. i’ve read that the Barca locals are getting a bit hacked off with the sheer volume of tourists these days.

      1. tell me bout it– for Mobile World Congress there in February, almost the entire town is already completely booked out!

      2. Well, I won’t be touristing much. I’ll be working. Plus, I try hard not to be an Ugly American as best I can.

      3. Given the sorry state of Spain’s economy and their horrid youth unemployment, one would imagine that they’d be knee-to-floor grateful for tourists and their spending cash.

4. Can’t they use part of that $75M to buy Rick Steves? Would be like when Sirius bought Howard Stern.

   1. I dont think it was $75mm

      1. just wanted to see if you were paying attention. By the way, mm for million…you’re clearly a PE guy at heart Fred!

5. Get these results to show up in a Google search result.

6. Cool. Is it available just on the web?

   1. Its a hyrbrid thing. You use the web to generate the URL or share post and it populates a list on your phone

7. Bloomberg to DC

8. I think it’s a clever way for them to get more exposure on social networks, I’m surprised Facebook haven’t formalised this behaviour on the timeline because I already see it informally on my timeline

9. Gonna try this. Assuming you can modify the tweet to also tag connections in that area so they see it?

10. and your Foursquare driverless car will be waiting at SF airport to take you to each tip in turn.

11. Good feature.Maybe I’m not seeing it, but TT doesn’t appear on my FS homepage. I had to click on your link.Also, why stop at cities? Go down to street/neighborhood level. I’m in Harlem planning “a trip” this evening to Chelsea. No easy way to do that on FS home page (or app for that matter). On Google I can click on the map and then nearby to get a list of options.People geo-locate and reference on maps better than lists.

12. Cool – thanks – I didn’t know about that feature. Can you see who is making the recommendation, like on Yelp? For example, can you see the difference between a restaurant recommendation from your greasy-spoon friend vs. your healthy friend?

13. Reminds of an instance of #lazyweb — which sounds good so I’m giving it a go!I’m in Paris and Rome (back and forth) over next 4 days, so I just triptipped “Paris”, and I’m assuming I should wait a day before doing “Rome” (I’m wondering if a packed, multi-stop trip will look suspect as a stream of Tweets).

    1. as a side note, in Paris, where I’m currently spending a lot of time, I heavily rely on @fredwilson:disqus’s list: https://foursquare.com/fred…But that town is changing a lot, and a bunch of places are no longer there! (Bones, for example)

14. Such a seamless interaction! The recommendation engine Foursquare has been using has consistently been impressing me. It will be great to have input from friends already out there.

15. I love Foursquare (& Swarm) and has some of the most reliable info about places / restaurants when I travel. Yelp reviews & ratings are usually unhelpful. I’ll take this new feature for a spin on my trip to London.That said, I’m absolutely stunned at the treasure chest of data that Foursquare is sitting on and how it’s not manifesting itself in the app. If you search Google for a place (say, London Tower), they display the popular times for that venue. Google is probably getting that data from Android phones. It’s super useful both to know when the place is open and when it gets too busy.That’s just one of features foursquare has not done it. They have a lot more.

16. Love the idea, just gave this a spin, and came away with just one CRINGE.That pre-canned copy (with an exclamation point!) is unnecessary and users should be allowed to write what they want to say, in their voice (only) — reminds of when FB used to begin every News Feed update with ‘Chris is…’

    1. great feedback

       1. it would be cool to allow a ‘suggestor’ to leave a personalised voice message for the travellor, as part of the places link. It would allow identification of the suggestor, and a story to go with why they suggest the place.

17. I gotta tell you that although this works great in developed metro areas, anytime (including today because of this post) that I have checked foursquare in the local area that I am in (for food) I get disappointing unusable results. [1] I can check opentable for the same area and have great results. Also foursquare doesn’t understand the concept of regions. So if I do a search for “greek” instead of the geo area being expanded as it should (for someone with a car) what I get is Panera Bread as the 2nd suggestion (because they have 1 greek item on the menu apparently..) The awesome greek place that is located in a town 7 minutes away doesn’t come up at all. So there is no sense of “people who live HERE often dine THERE”.[1] Like walking into a soviet supermarket in the 60’s (not that I was ever in one of those but hey I’ve seen pictures).

18. fwiw Fred, that record shop listed therein first on your list is maybe the greatest record store in the world.

    1. That’s just because the greatest record store (in Philly on 3rd st) in the world closed in 1997:http://articles.philly.com/…

       1. never more vulnerable than when at the top.

    2. well then i may have to find my way there today. i wonder if they ship purchases to far away places. my turnable and record collection is in amagansett

       1. Indeed they do — the store itself isn’t huge, a big chunk of their business is online/mail.Also, and even more important: they send out a weekly email (Saturday mornings) that is absolutely fantastic, and you should sign up immediately. It’s not so much the records they pick that makes the email great as it is the actual writing about those records…it’s just fantastic.

          1. Great comment.

    3. Shome mishtake, shurely*? That would be Sounds of the Universe in Soho, London.*https://en.wiktionary.org/w…

19. I’ve avoided foursquare for years but this post finally pushed me over the tipping point. Just downloaded it. First reaction is that it gives me everything I’ve been missing in my life. 😉 Love the Trip Tips. thanks @fredwilson:disqus

    1. yesssssssss

    2. Curious why you were avoiding it? Was that intentional?

       1. I just didn’t like the thought of taking the exploration factor out of the real world and putting it down on a device.

          1. Neither do I.

20. One thing worth remembering is that most people don’t have 500k(!) followers on twitter, and thus are likely to get a fraction of the value out of this as you did Fred.Do you ever set up dummy accounts to better understand new experiences from the point of an average user? Would be interesting in how that varies from your primary experience.

    1. most people will use facebook and get recommendations from friends

       1. I like this service because it forces your friends to do the work (find place + write tip). Otherwise, you may receive pdfs or long emails that are not organized. Will you tell us which of these you actually go to and would also recommend? @fredwilson:disqus

          1. Yup, the disorganized emails was the scenario we were trying to solve with our “welcome kits” a few years ago. For seattle, mine can be seen: http://www.ohheyworld.com/c…

21. Tried Trip Tips, which I’ve been looking for forever. Biggest bummer is my list doesn’t tell me WHO recommended a place. Makes follow up questions and conversations impossible.

    1. #featurerequest or #userfeedback. either way, thanks!

22. On Demand Recommendations

23. Foursquare’s focus on tips, from the point of view of this outsider, seems to be the bedrock of all that’s good about Foursquare.My favorite part about Foursquare is, simply, it’s accuracy in predicting what’s good. If something is over a 9.0, it’s generally a sure bet; and if a dish or something to try at a venue appears in that venue’s “top tips” it’s also usually a sure bet.Making this happen, I would assume, is reliant upon the decision to use tips vs. reviews. Instead of calculating an average of 1 thru 5 stars via an aggregate collection of tainted votes (most studies show that people have different criteria for what is worth, say, a “3”), simply asking people to leave a tip means that you can use natural word processing to determine sentiment (without the bias structure of asking for a star rating) and also pull common words to figure out the things a lot of people find worth trying at venue.I get how this works on the backend (or or at least how I assume it works) because I have a solid grasp of how tech like this works in general. Most people don’t. But when people see me pull out Foursquare on my phone (which is frequently) and then they say, “Really, I thought no one used Foursquare anymore?” and I say, “Well, I still use it because the ratings and tips are the best, because the tech does X, Y, Z,” people generally say, “Oh, wow, that makes sense — why doesn’t Foursquare make that clear?”Which is my question exactly.I know talking about how your tech is better is generally a bad branding strategy. But there are exceptions. Uber vs. Lyft is a good one (for a while, Uber simply was more reliable tech wise). And Foursquare might be an exception, too. They might want to try appealing to people with a “better tech for better recommendations” strategy, if anything because it’s true and there don’t seem to be any competitors who are even close to pulling off the same thing, tech wise.

24. You hadn’t heard of Blue Bottle coffee before that tip, Fred? I’m guessing you had.The bigger problem with Foursquare/Swarm is that most people don’t travel nearly as much as VCs and the people in VCs’ social circles. Most people go to the same few places every week.I followed a guy on Twitter a few years ago who kept checking in to the same 7-11 in Texas everyday. Turned out he worked there. He was probably the mayor of it.

    1. Well i guess that explains why Yelp is such a small business. Only VCs use it. Thanks. That helps

       1. Union Square Ventures – ✦✦✧✧✧ – Staff was friendly, but was a hair in my term sheet.

       2. The force is strong in you this week.

       3. You make a good point. It’s not easy to pick winners. That’s why VCs get the big bucks.

25. stick a fork in foursquare, it’s over. i appreciate a good pivot… but.i hope the best for them.

    1. Why do people like you have to be so negative and use terms like “stick a fork in”? First you are wrong but even if you weren’t wrong, you have bad manners. Grow up

       1. Sorry Fred (W) but I don’t agree that either figurative language or negativity equates to bad manners. I would have thought you valued a free discussion (within reason). Wouldn’t it be more worthwhile to ask why the OP sees it that way?

       2. sorry. i once said “stick a fork in it” about twitter. i still feel that way about twitter, but now at these valuations, i just bought a ton of stock in twitter.

26. You are a master salesperson Fred.The net of it/this to me is that none of these tools are better than the networks you build on them.I like the mechanics of what I see here. A lot!For me though, i have a massive global network on Facebook that for travel just about anywhere is hard to beat for anthing.I need a reason to switch and rebuild as you can’t airlift community. Doesn’t work.Isn’t that FoursSquare’s job to make me want to do it? You are, they are not.

    1. Agree with you on this.Being someone that built Ohheyworld.com a few years ago & went after solving this same problem with “welcome kits” — this is a step in the right direction for Foursquare product wise, but still a long way from being able to pull over people from FB. Like you, I have a massive global network of friends around the globe, and it’ll be very hard to get that whole community to migrate somewhere else.There is a severe lack of incentives on travel tips. A product like this may work for Fred, but I’m not convinced it’ll work for the average traveler without an insane tech/global network of connections. There is actually a disincentive to share tips in an environment like this… many people do NOT want other travelers to find the gems, because massive exposure to travelers often changes establishments for the worse for locals (busier, higher prices). Truly great travel advice is only available to trusted connections, and I don’t see that changing anytime soon.

27. This looks awesome – is foursquare big out side of the US?

28. i may try Foursquare one day, perhaps when my Moto E dies and the replacement phone has enough memory capacity to store apps of passing interest to me. it’s on the list.

29. I wonder how effective this feature is for people who don’t have half a million twitter followers.Often the “share this” CTA is akin to “do our marketing, because… what else are you using your dormant social accounts for”.

    1. “I wonder how effective this feature is for people who don’t have half a million twitter followers.”Likely not very…

30. “And here is the list as it stands (less than ten mins after my tweet!)”I’m not sure most of us have over half a million followers!

31. I’m going to SF in a couple of weeks. I may use your trip tips instead of mine!