Fumbling with Foursquare
I keep hearing how cool/revolutionary/hip this "Foursquare" thing is, so I figured I'd give it a try.
Perhaps part of my problem is that I've got a Blackberry which, for some reason, doesn't yet have a Foursquare client. It works fine from its web browser, I'm told, but... this doesn't make much sense to me.
Question: Does the Foursquare client for other smart-phones have some sort of geo-location feature (using cell towers or such)? Because, when using the web browser on the Blackberry, all it does is narrow my options down to the "Twin Cities" (which, if you don't know, is pretty big).
I'm 0 for 3 in the Foursquare locations I've searched for, and the search process seems really awkward. When it finds something, the results seem random; that's probably because the locations are manually entered by other Foursquare members, but it seems to lead to a mess.
For instance, this morning, I was at the Holiday station in Eagan. There are three Holidays in Eagan, in fact, but none of them appeared in Foursquare search. What did turn up was permutations of "Holiday Gas," "Holiday Station Store," etc. -- some with locations in their title and some without, some with complete addresses and some without.
What I want is an app that behaves like your contacts on your phone: Based on cell-tower location, a list of known sites is populated, and as you type parts of the name ("Holiday" or "gas") it would narrow down the list.
Plus, I'd like some sort of "scrubbing" of the data on the back-end, so that duplicate entries are matched and removed.
Is that something that other incarnations of Foursquare do and I'm just suffering on a bad client, or is what I'm dreaming of just way too complicated for today's technology?
Perhaps part of my problem is that I've got a Blackberry which, for some reason, doesn't yet have a Foursquare client. It works fine from its web browser, I'm told, but... this doesn't make much sense to me.
Question: Does the Foursquare client for other smart-phones have some sort of geo-location feature (using cell towers or such)? Because, when using the web browser on the Blackberry, all it does is narrow my options down to the "Twin Cities" (which, if you don't know, is pretty big).
I'm 0 for 3 in the Foursquare locations I've searched for, and the search process seems really awkward. When it finds something, the results seem random; that's probably because the locations are manually entered by other Foursquare members, but it seems to lead to a mess.
For instance, this morning, I was at the Holiday station in Eagan. There are three Holidays in Eagan, in fact, but none of them appeared in Foursquare search. What did turn up was permutations of "Holiday Gas," "Holiday Station Store," etc. -- some with locations in their title and some without, some with complete addresses and some without.
What I want is an app that behaves like your contacts on your phone: Based on cell-tower location, a list of known sites is populated, and as you type parts of the name ("Holiday" or "gas") it would narrow down the list.
Plus, I'd like some sort of "scrubbing" of the data on the back-end, so that duplicate entries are matched and removed.
Is that something that other incarnations of Foursquare do and I'm just suffering on a bad client, or is what I'm dreaming of just way too complicated for today's technology?
Comments
And, there is a Blackberry app coming. I am in line to beta test this as well.
Keep in mind, foursquare is sort of a mashup of a game, Google Latitude and twitter...it mostly for fun