Neil Phillips’ blog

I’ve been using foursquare for a while now, and, inspired by Tony’s post, there are a few features I’ve love to see implemented either by them or one of their competitors in this space (foursquare, gowalla, brightkite, urbanspoon, dopplr, tripit, latitude).

• Optional automatic check in when I’ve stayed in one place for more than, say 15 minutes (could include a list of pre-approved auto check in places, like work, and unknown places would be stored for post approval before publishing).
• Needs to work in the background, with no user intervention
• Be able to rate locations (e.g. 4 stars) and tag them folksonmically
• Be able to photograph them
• Be able to add metadata (e.g. twitter account names [edit : in place in February], or facebook profiles, last.fm location)
  Be able to say “I’ve been there” without tagging a particular datetime - e.g. to be a past record of places I’ve been, like urbanspoon
• Be able to see who’s there now, and who’s been there before (optional for visitor, e.g. as a privacy setting)
• Be able to say “I’m going there in a few weeks”
• Be able to say “I’m going to this city or area in a few weeks”, rather than just a particular venue.
• Be nice to have some augmented reality goodness on appropriate clients
• Should be able to edit data as well as add data about a venue. [edit 2010/01/05] you can do this once you’re promoted to a super user
• [added 2010/01/16] Context sensitivity would be nice - if I look at a cinema it shows me what’s on, if I check in at a cinema, when I check in to the next place, it asks me if I want to review the film etc.
• links to facebook fan pages for venues
• opening times / dates (would have been handy at Christmas)
• graph of when people check in - is this an evening venue or breakfast place
• better browse - e.g. show me where’s cool nearby (and nearby should be a relative term depending on 4sq location density)
• should be able to flag users, locations and tips as offensive
• ’star’ a location, for later comment[end of added 2010/01/16]
• [added 2010/04/20]
• urban spoon sync for foursquare
• schedule events in foursquare
• foursquarevirtual taxi rank
• Popular times/ days
• Include a ’show in nearby list’ tick box
• Infer opening hours from checkins
• foursquare thick client ?
• Opentap- Do bus ticket billing using 4sq
• Foursquare for Alzheimers patients (autocheckin via multitasking)
• Don’t update geolocation unless there’s a numbered street address
• let web client update names of venues without mandatory fields
• warnings when you use long place names (so they look OK via mobile UI)
• Hierarchical checkin locations eg Sydney airport gates
• hierarchical mayorships (based on hierarchical relationships) - mayor of USA
• Client side flagging of duplicates - fix via Amazon Turk
• Foursquare - automatic login for taxi drivers or better matching for taxis and passengers
• Browse for somewhere to go rather than where you are. E&g tips view becomes most popular places nearby
• Star a location (for desktop review)
• Eargmented reality (hear a commentary/tips as you walk past)
• [end of added 2010/04/20]

All of that said, I think there’s a lot of value going to be had out of these kind of apps.