foursquare

“Meet the Mayor of Momofuku Milk Bar Nathan Archambault, Foursquare’s Mayor of Momofuku Bakery & Milk Bar. Foursquare, the mobile social networking game that lets users “check into” restaurants, bars, gyms and more, has become a bit of a media darling in the past year, and we at Zagat aren’t immune to its charms – you can find our tips on many Foursquare listings, after all. But who are the folks doing all that checking in? We thought we’d find out. Meet Nathan Archambault, a 30-year-old copywriter living in the East Village, who’s the Mayor of David Chang’s Momofuku Bakery & Milk Bar.”

Read entire interview

In NYC?  Planning on coming by the #4sqDay party tonight?  Excellent - We can’t wait to see you!  It’s at the Hotel on Rivington (penthouse) down in the Lower East Side, NYC.  Some helpful tips…

+ There’s probably going to be a line.  And it’s probably going to be a huge one.  Doors open at 10p, but you may want to get there a bit early. 

+ Party is open to everyone, though you’ll have to show the door person you have foursquare on your phone to get in.  

+ Party goes till 2am, but I heard that if it gets packed, they may not let anyone in after 11:30 :(

+ If you can’t get in for some reason, let’s say that the spillover / after party location is THE MAGICIAN (50 feet away, corner of Rivington & Essex).  Grab those tables in the back room! 

Sound good?  Hope to see you tonite!

- team foursquare

Hmm… we posted a follow-up to some of the questions folks were having about our efforts to thwart “cheat” checkins.  Looks like the comment didn’t take (having some problems w/ Disqus - stay tuned), so here it is re-posted:

—-

Hey all - 

First of all, I can’t tell you how psyched we are to see so many people passionate about foursquare - this is crazy!  Second, a few quick updates that didn’t make it into our original blog post.

#1.  We are going to be *constantly* tweaking the rules that determine whether a checkin is “accurate” or not.  We’re using some GPS, the GPS’ accuracy reading, some elements of your history, a look at your checkin patterns, etc.  We’ve already turned the knobs a few times since we launched and we tweaked them again this afternoon.   For those who saw lots of “you’re a little far away” messages yesterday, you should be seeing fewer of them today and even fewer of them tomorrow.  This is a hard problem us to solve, so bear with us :)

#2.  If you’re using an iPod Touch, iPad or another device that uses Wi-Fi for location, you probably already know that the GPS coordinates that come from Wi-Fi can be a little off sometimes.  If you find that you’re seeing flaky GPS fixes, you can always use the mobile website to checkin as you may have better results.

#3.   If your phone doesn’t know your location - for example, if you checkin using SMS or the mobile website - you are NOT out of luck.  When we don’t have a lat/long, we use a different set of rules - your history, frequency, etc - to determine whether you are the cheating type or not.  :)

#4.  The API.  Our iPhone, Android and Blackberry apps all work on the same public API that everyone else is using - which means everyone is playing by the same rules.  Most of our API apps pass along the current lat/long on checkin and we use this for cheat detection.  In the case where an API app does not pass along a lat/long, we use other methods (history, frequency, etc) to determine if the checkin is “accurate”.

Anyway, we hope this clears some things up.  

 - team foursquare

Hey all -

Some of you may have noticed that we rolled out the first version of our “cheater code” - an attempt to catch some of the folks that are checking in from their couches to steal mayorships.  Since last summer, this has been one of our most requested features and has been one of the trickiest to get just right.

What we’d like to do is award points, mayorships and badges only when you’re at the place you say you’re at.  Last week we started using a few different tricks using your phone’s GPS to try to verify this.  (and if your phone doesn’t use GPS, we use a few different tricks)

Now, we’re never going to NOT let you check-in - you can checkin wherever you want, whenever you want - the idea is simply to not award points, mayorships, badges or venue specials if it looks like you didn’t really earn them.  

And so far it seems like it’s working pretty well.  We are seeing some issues where people should be getting points / badges / mayors but they’re not.  This could be because the GPS location your phone gave us was slightly off or because the address / pushpin where we located the venue wasn’t quite right. We’ve been keeping an eye on these problems and we’re fine-tuning the rules, so please bear with us as we keep tweaking things to get it just right.

In the meantime, if there are certain places that are consistently giving you a problem, tell us about them and we’ll make sure to look into it:  http://4sq.com/4sqGeoWoes

Again, thanks for your patience as we work to figure this out.  You’ve been asking for it, we’ve been listening and it’s a tricky problem to fix… but we’re getting there.  :)

- team foursquare

ps:  Also worth noting that we’re fine with pre-checkins and post-checkins… you know, the checkins you send *before* you’re at a place (“I’ll be there in 10 mins!”) and the checkins you send us *after* you leave when you realize you forgot to check-in while you were there.  (Trust us, we do it too to fill out our history pages!)  The only difference now is that to unlock foursquare rewards - mayors, points, badges, etc - those checkins needs to be sent from that place.  Cool?