Foursquare now gives ratings for locations, becomes Yelp competitor

I am so glad for this. Yelp ratings have been horribly un-useful to me. Their questionable business practices aside, it's really hard for me to figure out good places to eat when I'm in an unfamiliar city. And Yelp's ratings are to me useless: highly recommended places which are terrible, and mediocre recommendations on places that are actually quite good for what they're aiming to be. One good thing about Yelp is it tells you if places are open now or not, and what kind of dress code to expect.<p>Yelp provides a service I really need in a way and from a company that I really don't like, so I'm delighted to hear about competition!

In the long run, I'm a lot more likely to believe ratings which are generated passively (through one's actions) vs. through conscious effort. Humans are unreliable self-reporters, and in a lot of cases have commercial or other bias. Plus, there are lots of BS Yelp reviews, like "I am giving this place 1 star because the server looks like my ex-boyfriend who cheated on me".<p>On the other hand, just tracking where I check in on foursquare will be kind of boring. Office, restaurants near the office (which kind of suck, compared to places even a few blocks away), airports, etc. I hope they have some kind of interesting filtering to solve that.<p>What I'd really like is something built on my actual purchasing history, deeper into the venue than just presence. Knowing that I always get a double double or 4x4 at innout is a pretty valid endorsement. Knowing that whenever I go to Apple stores, I buy Applecare for the products, also useful. It's useful (blinded, statistically) to other people, and presumably could be useful from a loyalty perspective, or just for personal purchase tracking, to me. (I kind of use my Amazon purchasing history like that, now. i.e. "what printer do I have in the office, so I know what toner to buy, when I'm not at the office to check".)<p>A payment provider (Amex for me, or maybe Square someday) is probably in the best position to do this, actually.

Local search today is in the state that web search was in, pre-Google. There are lots of Yahoos and Altavistas, but no Google (Yelp is so reminiscent of Yahoo web search).<p>Foursquare still has a long way to go before it can consistently give better results than Yelp, but this is a great start! Hope some startups get inspired by this and realize that local search is not a dead problem to work on!

Last night at 11pm, I stood a block from penn station trying to find a Subway sandwhich store that was still open. Armed with my iphone, it took me a full 15-20 minutes and a half dozen calls before I found one.<p>Sometimes I feel like companies like foursquare would be better off working on much, much more basic(and less glamorous) problems than ratings and check-ins stuff.

I wonder if that really adds much information value in the grand scheme of things. Yelp is built for ratings and reviews and I can't see myself making the extra trip to Foursquare to see how its users rate something when Yelp will be far more useful.<p>But what 4sq has that Yelp doesn't is number of visits (per user) and time-relation of visits between places. Instead of ratings, a metric unique to 4sq would be repeat visits (cleaned in such a way to eliminate superficial checkins) and where people go immediately before and after visiting a given place. I would rather see that kind of behavioral data leveraged more than have one more place where people rate things

The problem with this is that everyone uses Yelp and nobody but hipsters uses foursquare. I'm fact even hipsters have moved on from foursquare. Without liquidity of use any ratings system will just be so sparse as to be anecdotal.<p>I don't see a problem wit yelp, reading only a star rating isn't a good way to make it useful, you have to speed read and sample the reviews. At a glance I can tell a reviewer who's fake, or one of the many that just like to hear the sound of their own voice, or they are just an opinionated asshole. But when you speed read a few comments you can pick up general trends. For example if many reviewers all say a hotel was noisy there might be something in it. Ditto for amazon. The "solution" that some have tried is to rate the rating, then use a pagerank-link algorithm to module the effect any one rater on the rating. In other words, if many people who themselves have been rated at rating highly accurately, then my influence on a rating is higher.<p>The suggestions I have seen here (mainly collaborative filtering) may be of merit, if that's have foursquare plan to do it then with more of a representative sampling of users and maybe it will work well. Currently though they would need a lot more users.<p>But personally I find yelp very useful, it just requires more effort than glancing at the star rating.

My reaction to this is, "It's about time!"<p>Yelp needs a competitor.<p>Foursquare needs to be more useful.

Don't forget to add on the xkcd comic!<p><a href="http://xkcd.com/1098/" rel="nofollow">http://xkcd.com/1098/</a><p>The trouble with these rating systems is that they're usually done by one of two groups: people who wish they were foodies or people who had a bad experience.<p>It's nice to see Foursquare get into this space, but like another commenter said -- it'd be nice to see them tackle the minor issues like hours of operations and menus (maybe through some sort of reward?).

I think Foursquare has been a Yelp competitor since they launched the Explore feature. I've been using it to find good stuff that my friends have been to. I'm likely to check out a place if a good friend of mine has been there several times than if a few strangers have given it 5/5 stars.

They should have become a yelp competitor in 2009, back when people still used Foursquare.

I personally prefer <a href="http://yask.it" rel="nofollow">http://yask.it</a> 1 to 10 ratings make people think too much, with yaskit is a 5 questions survey, 5 star rating and 1 open question, simple.