May 2010
9 posts
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“Foursquare is a little bit of everything—a friend-finder, a local city guide, an interactive mobile game,” said company cofounder Dennis Crowley, as if reading from the same tired script used by every one of these Web 2.0 or whatever-the-fuck-they’re-called startups. “But more than that, Foursquare is an [endless string of meaningless buzzwords we just couldn’t bring ourselves to transcribe].”
Added Crowley, “[Who gives a shit].”
” —The Onion wrote about foursquare. My work here is done. Thank you, goodnight!
(via dpstyles)
foursquare's ups and downs
Hey all -
Sorry about some of the ups and downs we’ve been having recently. We’re still growing like a weed over here, now doing on average 600k checkins/day. We’re going to spend this week focusing on beefing up things on our end to try to minimize the unexpected downtime.
Tomorrow (Tues 5/18) we’re going to take the site down from 5am to 7am EST to make some changes that should help a lot. Apologies in advance for the downtime, but at least this time it’s expected (instead of a surprise!)
Thanks again for your patience with all this. Growing pains are hard, but we’re working on it!
xo,
@foursquare
A redesigned app gallery
One of our goals since our API first launched was to create a space where we could feature your apps and make them easy for users to find. We did this with the first version of our app gallery, but soon realized that it wasn’t flexible enough for you.
With that in mind, we went back and thought about all your needs and where we want the apps community to go. Then we completely redesigned the app gallery. We’re really excited about the way it came out. Have a look:
You’ll now be able to submit your own apps. we loved responding to your emails one at a time, but we think this approach will be faster and more efficient :)
If you’re a developer and you’ve created an app on foursquare, be sure to add it to the gallery:
http://foursquare.com/apps/add
Each app will get its own landing page. each app will get its own custom URL – particularly useful when you want to link others back to it. The app page will allow you to show off screenshots, authors, and custom download links. Here’s a great example of one:
http://foursquare.com/app/mob_zombies
We’re still tweaking the gallery so we look forward to hearing your feedback!
We've just made the "Places" screen smarter!
We’ve made some changes in the way we list venues in the “Places” screen of our mobile apps and API. The problem with smart phones is that they’re good - but not great - at knowing exactly where you are. Also, there might be a lot of venues nearby that you are very unlikely to check into (like someone else’s apartment — which is great for them but not so much for you) that clutter up the list a little, and sometimes push the venue you want off the list altogether.
So in recent weeks we’ve been working on ways to bubble the best venues up to the top of the “Nearby” list. We consider things like the popularity of each venue, its distance from you (of course), and some neat effects like category and the current time — for example, at 8am you’re more likely to check into a coffee shop, but at 8pm bars and restaurants are more popular. We have sophisticated algorithms that balance all of these factors to present you the best possible list of venues so that you spend less time searching and more time enjoying wherever you’ve checked in.
Anyway, we’d love to hear your feedback on how the the new Places list seems to be working for you. And stay tuned… lots more good stuff in the works.
@harryh speaking at the MongoNYC conference
Hey there -
Interested in learning more about how foursquare is working with Mongo DB?
Our Lead Engineer, Harry Heymann (@harryh), will be presenting at MongoNYC, a full-day conference about MongoDB on May 21.
Early Bird pricing for MongoNYC is $100/ticket and ends on Friday, May 7 (today!) . You can register for the conference here. Hope to see you there!
