GigaOM » local search

Foursquare tweaks desktop version of site as it moves toward local search

Eliza Kern — Tue, 23 Apr 2013 16:00:17 +0000

Not surprisingly, Foursquare plans to announce Monday that it has made tweaks and improvements to its desktop listings for local businesses, highlighting once again that the company has moved beyond convincing people to become mayor of something and is doubling down on local search.

“You don’t need to check in to use Foursquare. Over the past few months, we’ve seen Explore use double,” the company wrote in a press release. “With billions of data points, we can always help you find the best places to go.”

The updates coming to Foursquare.com on Tuesday primarily reorganize the information on the business listing pages, making them easier to digest and putting important information like photos and hours more centrally located. The pages will include which of your friends have checked into locations (if you’ve logged in), suggest other places to go in the area, and share locations you’ve found with friends.

With Foursquare still struggling to find its footing several years and funding cycles down the road, it’s clear from the most recent mobile update that its best path to making money will come by challenging Yelp in the realm of local search. And if you’re going to challenge Yelp, you need a solid desktop presence.

Many people might be unfamiliar with Foursquare’s desktop site at all, but it’s actually been around for a while now, and the company said it gets more than 50 million visitors per month. Most of the changes to the business listings this Tuesday are design improvements, but as a Foursquare representative noted, the company hasn’t re-designed the listings since November 2011, when it launched Foursquare.com; they’re due for an update.

Here’s an example of the new desktop listings on the left and the old version on the right (click to enlarge):

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For Foursquare, why being mayor isn’t enough to build a business

Eliza Kern — Wed, 10 Apr 2013 17:40:44 +0000

Backed by a lot of hype and millions in funding, Foursquare turned the idea of “gamification” into one of the most buzzed-about ways to design your mobile app and attract users. The idea was that if checking into Foursquare gives me the hope of becoming mayor of my favorite coffee shop, I’ll be more likely to check in and frequent that business. Or so the theory went.

But now, more than four years after the startup launched at SXSW and more than $70 million in venture funding later, it seems gamification isn’t enough to keep Foursquare going. The company is rapidly embracing the concept of local search, launching a new version on Wednesday morning that highlights the “Explore” tab as a primary focus, and making clear that the quintessential Foursquare experience is no longer about being mayor of something: Foursquare wants to be your personalized version of Yelp.

“We’re crunching all our data to show the best of what’s nearby, anywhere in the world, the second you open up the app,” the company wrote Wednesday.

The app looks substantially different than before, eliminating the different tabs at the bottom that used to let users navigate from check-ins to search to profile, and instead creating one primary feed. The new design has a large check-in button at the bottom, and shows the Explore tab at the top of the main screen. It places more emphasis on where your friends are checking in nearby, and popular businesses at the moment.

Foursquare has been moving toward local search as its primary focus over the course of the last two years or so. Foursquare first launched the “Explore” tab in March 2011, allowing users to discover businesses nearby, but didn’t add a desktop equivalent until January 2012, when the company started to get serious about the feature. In October, the company opened up the search engine to everyone on the web, not just registered users, and CEO Dennis Crowley explained that they wanted users to start seeing Foursquare as more than just a place for check-ins. The company established an American Express partnership in June allowing customers to link their credit cards to unlock deals, and expanded tools for local merchants.

But it’s not just that Foursquare is tired of the whole mayor business — local search presents more opportunities to make money, and Foursquare needs to make money. A report in The Wall Street Journal in November said that Foursquare’s investors, who have put $20 million in June 2010 and then another $50 million in June 2011 into the company, wanted to see more growth than the company was experiencing. Despite bringing in more than $70 million dollars, Foursquare still only had about 8 million active users at the time, which isn’t all that substantial for a four year old company (Twitter now has more than 200 million active users, for comparison). And reports said it was bringing in only $2 million in revenue for 2012 – even after all of the new tactics for improving local search to make money.

So what’s the solution? Clearly, it’s to double down on local search.

“One of the challenges is to get people to think about Foursquare less as points and badges and more about local search and discovery,” Crowley explained to GigaOM back in October. “We really see Foursquare as reinventing ourselves with local search and recommendations. We’ve been telling users for a long time and now we can tell the same story and illustrate it for folks.”

The move presents challenges, obviously, in that Yelp is a clearly established leader in this market, and has a serious head start in convincing most businesses to set up pages there. However, Foursquare does add a social element to its business discovery that isn’t as much of a focus for Yelp. While Yelp has built a business around reviews, which are social to a certain extent, and interaction with reviewers, if I open Foursquare right now I’ll immediately see what businesses my friends have recommended. And for some people, a friend’s suggestion could be more powerful than a five star Yelp review.

Foursquare made one of the most high-profile attempts at re-building local commerce around the idea of loyal customers through app check-ins, but it seems that convincing people outside of Silicon Valley to check into their favorite establishments hasn’t worked. And without mass participation, that’s not a big enough audience to build a profitable business. Steve Wozniak might continue to maintain his mayorship of several Baskin Robbins, and the company will need people to continue checking in to build its data.

But for Foursquare, it’s time to start checking into more traditional forms of gathering revenue with discounts and desktop search.

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Foursquare courts small business owners with new mobile app

Eliza Kern — Tue, 29 Jan 2013 18:27:45 +0000

Foursquare announced Tuesday that it’s launching a dedicated app for small business owners that allows them to manage their Foursquare accounts and push updates and specials to customers on the go, as it hopes to become more of a player in local commerce.

On Foursquare’s blog, the company explained the rationale behind the standalone app for business owners:

Over a million businesses use Foursquare to connect with their customers using our free tools. But sometimes, when you’re running around on the floor, it’s hard to hop on a computer and post yourlatesthappenings, like the spring collection that just arrived or your newest menu item. So today, we’re releasing the Foursquare for Business companion app to help business owners share news with their customers, right from their phone.

The app is available to businesses in iPhone and Android versions, and is meant for small business owners to post updates and specials to their business page on Foursquare and then cross-post to Twitter and Facebook without having to visit the desktop site. The company launched a local search product earlier this year, and has been working to target business owners as part of its revenue strategy based on promotions and search.

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Evernote Food 2.0 wants to inspire meals, not just record them

Ryan Kim — Wed, 19 Dec 2012 19:00:07 +0000

Evernote launched its first food app a year ago, helping people capture the end product of a great meal, whether it was one they made or one they enjoyed at a restaurant. But that wasn’t enough for Evernote.

Now the note-taking company is launching a revamped Evernote Food 2.0 iPhone app, along with a brand new iPad app, that aspires to be a one-stop shop for food. That means it will help people decide what to do for their upcoming meals by giving them thousands of recipe options and offering a local restaurant search tool. It’s a big step up for Evernote and puts it in competition with applications such as Yelp and Google and food apps like Allrecipes and Foodspotting.

The core feature of the original app is still captured in a My Meals tab, that allows users to take pictures, add captures and tags to remember previous meals. But the big changes are on the discovery side. Now, a user can access a Restaurants tab powered by Foursquare that lets them find nearby restaurants and save them to a list. You can search for specific restaurants to get business information or just enter a category like “Mexican” or “Sushi.” There’s also a My Meals library which remembers every saved meal. It’s a great way to look back at where you’ve gone and see what particular dishes you had at each place.

A new Explore Recipes tab driven by Punchfork gives users access to thousands of recipes from blogs and different online publications. You can browse a list of suggested recipes or search for something specific such as a dish, ingredient or a particular blog. Evernote Food uses an internal browser to call up each recipe page so the original publisher gets the traffic. Users can just clip the recipe and save it to their Evernote account. When they head out to the store, everything is synced on the iPhone.

The saved recipes show up in the My Cookbook tab, which serves as a library of clipped recipes. Evernote can also add recipes from an Evernote note by analyzing it and recognizing it as a recipe. So if you want to create your own recipe, Evernote Food can organize it easily into your library.

When Evernote Food first debuted, I framed it as a way for Evernote to help organize a user’s past. But Evernote Food 2.0 is a lot more useful for food lovers and makes it something users will want to reach for on a regular basis, not just at the end of a good meal. It makes a lot of sense for Evernote to venture into discovery. Now, it’s not waiting for people to come up with their own meal ideas, it can inspire people to do that. And then it can capture all the memories, which just makes Evernote that much more important.

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Facebook Nearby is not a Foursquare killer yet

Ryan Kim — Wed, 19 Dec 2012 18:07:52 +0000

Facebook’s upgrade to its Nearby mobile feature was framed as a Foursquare killer by some with its ability to provide local search, recommendations and information. But in trying out Nearby, Foursquare still comes out on top for me as a local search tool. That’s to be expected when you consider all the investments Foursquare has made in local but it shows how much Facebook needs to do to get competitive in local search. And this is not even considering comparisons to Yelp and Google, which are also strong local search tools.

This might be comforting for Foursquare but the location-based service doesn’t have Facebook’s reach and many people still don’t see it as a local search tool. Foursquare’s will have to work to stay ahead of Facebook and more importantly, turn people on to its local search and recommendation engine Explore.

Here’s a look at how the two stack up as local search tools:

Facebook Nearby, a menu tab within Facebook’s mobile apps and websites, offers a tool for finding places, both nearby and across a larger area. It loads up recommendations first with venues that friends have visited, recommended or liked. With Facebook’s much bigger user base, that should provide a lot of signals over Foursquare, which has just 25 million registered users. But it’s not that big of an edge in most cases because a lot of people haven’t tagged their updates with locations or interacted with businesses on Facebook.

You can browse for nearby stuff or look across different categories like restaurants, coffee, nightlife, shopping, outdoors. But it’s when you start actually searching for stuff that you realize Facebook still has more work to do. I searched for “sushi” in my neighborhood and the second listing was for a steakhouse and barbecue restaurant. On my map, I was only shown two restaurants within ten blocks of me. On Foursquare, I found ten restaurants in the same area including my favorite, which didn’t even show up on Facebook.

A business needs to have a Facebook Page to show up on Nearby. Some listings appear to be automatically generated but others businesses will need to get on Facebook to make Nearby really useful for users. Facebook also sometimes struggles with multiple pages for one location and doesn’t pick up new restaurants that fast. The company said that it will also be incorporating more third-party data so this should improve soon.

Facebook’s local data also has less depth. When you visit an actual page for a business, you get the ability to see information like hours and address and you can call the restaurant up, check in or “like” it. There’s a user-based rating systems as well as recommendations left by users. This is nice but it doesn’t provide the same richness you can get on Foursquare.

For example, a popular Peruvian chicken restaurant in my neighborhood had two recommendations on Facebook. On Foursquare, the same place had 28 tips and 50 pictures. Also, with Foursquare pages, you can save the place on a list, get directions, book a table and see a menu. And if the place is part of a saved list, you can check out what other users also like similar to that restaurant. Foursquare also provides a rating on a 10-point scale for locations, based on popularity and user interactions with more weighting given to local experts. I appreciate that more than Facebook’s simpler five-star system which can often lead to a lot 3.5 star ratings.

Again a lot of this has to do with Foursquare’s experience in local search and its refinements over the years including one earlier this week. But the differences aren’t just manifested on the surface.

Foursquare has been using its more than 3 billion check-ins and other interactions to tune its Explore recommendation engine. That input helps Foursquare come up with more unique and personal suggestions. While Facebook recommends local businesses based on friends who have liked a business, checked in, rated a restaurant or left a recommendation, Foursquare looks at tips, likes, dislikes, overall popularity, user loyalty to a location, and the local expertise of top visitors. It also factors in whether a place is listed on one of its user-created lists. And then it looks for matches for users based on their tastes or people like them. It also considers the time of day, so the recommendations change more frequently throughout the day.

Facebook has its advantages too like its more than 600 million mobile user base. That can be helpful because it potentially means more input from real friends. And for some users, what Facebook currently provides will be enough; they may not be looking for the level of detail that Foursquare provides. But the challenge is to get people to think of using Facebook’s mobile apps and website as a local search engine, something most people aren’t trained to do. Facebook isn’t helping by hiding the Nearby tab inside the menu bar. That’s going to take a while for people to discover.

Facebook should be more competitive once businesses start running local ads that appear in the main news feed. That’s not happening yet but when it inevitably does, it will encourage people to check out the Nearby tool. And if Nearby starts displaying local deals like Foursquare does, it will be another reason to take it for a spin.

As Nearby grows, it could steal away existing Foursquare users and pick off others before they give it a try. That’s something Foursquare absolutely needs to defend against. But right now Facebook has just dipped its toe into the market and has a lot more to do to get competitive.

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Facebook muscles in on Yelp and Foursquare with Nearby upgrades

Ryan Kim — Mon, 17 Dec 2012 21:50:08 +0000

Facebook is finally getting serious about its local ambitions with an upgrade to its Nearby mobile feature, which will pit Facebook against Yelp, Foursquare and Google. Now, the Nearby tab in Facebook’s apps for iOS and Android, which used to only display friend check-ins, will now offer up a lot more data on local places, including ratings, recommendations and business information.

Now Facebook users can see a list of places that Facebook believes are relevant to them based on friend check-in data, likes and user recommendations. They can browse different categories and subcategories or search for specific businesses. Individual business listings tell you which of your friends liked that business and other pertinent information like address, distance and hours. Users can opt to call the business, check in upon arriving, view the business on a map or visit the merchant’s Timeline. Facebook is also providing user ratings for businesses, which Facebook began testing in October.

Like Foursquare, Facebook Nearby will get better and more personal the more people use it. Facebook said it will also look to add places from third party services in the future, which could mean Foursquare data as well. Businesses who want to show up in Nearby will need to establish and maintain a Facebook Page.

The improvements to Nearby should help Facebook become more useful to mobile users, who are very intent driven when they search for things. That, in turn, could help Facebook make some money if it can tap into the local advertising market. Nearby doesn’t sport any ads right now but it’s easy to see how Facebook could insert sponsored suggestions for local businesses.

I’m not sure how big of an initial threat Nearby will pose to Yelp or Foursquare. Most users are not used to looking to the hard-to-find Nearby tab for local search and recommendations the way that hardcore Yelp or Foursquare users are trained to search through those services. And there is richer content right now on Yelp and Foursquare as well as Google, which can show Zagat ratings and information.

But Facebook has more than 600 monthly mobile users. And it says that 150 million people visit Pages on Facebook every day around the world and more than half of those visits in the U.S. come from a mobile device.

This should be an interesting product to watch because it will indicate how serious Facebook is in mobile and location-based services. And it provides another glimpse at how Facebook will try to make mobile pay off.

The rollout of Nearby is starting with a small number of users but should spread soon to all iOS and Android users soon.

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Report: Potential Foursquare investors raising eyebrows at paltry revenue

Ryan Kim — Wed, 21 Nov 2012 19:04:16 +0000

Location-based service Foursquare is reportedly expected to bring in $2 million in revenue this year after finally launching its first advertising products, reports the Wall Street Journal. It’s a modest start — to be kind — and may not be fast enough for investors who are wavering on whether to plunk down money in Foursquare’s upcoming funding round.

The Journal said that some investors are balking at Foursquare’s internal valuation of $760 million, which was reportedly SET in May when Spark Capital bought $30 million of shares in the company from employees. Foursquare is now working on a big Series D round between $50 and $100 million, TechCrunch reported recently, which would value the company at more than $700 million. That would follow a $50 million round last year which placed a $600 million valuation on the company.

The Journal said that some investors are worried about slowing growth, something Foursquare vice president Jon Steinbeck acknowledged in the story. The New York startup has more than 25 million users but only 8 million are monthly active users.

Foursquare CEO and co-founder Dennis Crowley

Foursquare may not be worth $760 million in the eyes of some investors, especially in this tech environment, which is taking a toll on other big social companies like Facebook. But I think Foursquare is also getting its act together and really starting to make use of all of its big data. With its more than 2.5 billion check-ins and even more use behavior data, it’s learning a lot about how to bring users together with interesting places.

As we’ve mentioned before, there’s an opportunity for Foursquare to start scooping up local search advertising revenue if it can make its Explore engine a go-to search and discovery resource for more people. Foursquare has said recently that 20 percent of people who search for a place end up checking-in at the location within three days.

That’s the challenge for Foursquare: it needs to keep getting more people to use it like a daily utility, so it can make more money through its paid promoted updates. Foursquare is trying to help the process along by opening up its website as a local search tool to all users. But it needs to keep on growing and show that its data is a valuable asset. Yelp, which currently has a market cap of $1.2 billion, had 84 million unique monthly visitors including 8.2 million visitors from a mobile device as of the most recent quarter.

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Foursquare takes on Yelp with 10-point rating system

Ryan Kim — Mon, 05 Nov 2012 22:02:24 +0000

Foursquare has been pitching itself as a local search tool but until now, it didn’t have a rating systems for places like Yelp’s five stars or Google’s Zagat 3o-point scale. But now, the location-based service is introducing a 10-point rating system that will give users a better idea about how good a place might actually be.

With the latest update to the iOS app, Foursquare will now include the score on places when a user conducts a search through Foursquare’s Explore engine. Users can also check out the scores online at Foursquare’s recently beefed up website.

In a not so-subtle dig at Yelp, the company said in a blog post that users don’t have to put up with a bunch of 3.5 star ratings. Foursquare comes up with its score by looking at tips left by users, likes, dislikes, popularity, check-ins and it also weights signals more heavily for local experts.

The ratings help boost Foursquare as a local recommendation tool, giving people a number they can latch on to. It’s part of Foursquare’s evolution into a local search engine, which it hopes can ultimately compete with Google and Yelp for users and advertisers. We’ve noted that Foursquare recently opened up its website to non-members, turning its home page into a Google-like search tool. And it previously added menus and OpenTable integration as well.

The fact that the new score is a combination of a bunch of user behavior and algorithmic work means it might be harder to game the ratings, as sometimes happens on Yelp. But it also means some merchants might be unhappy with their scores or may not understand how to improve them. We’ll have to see if Foursquare’s 25 million users start trusting its ratings the way they might with Yelp stars. But I’m looking forward to the system because I see so many 3.5 and 4-star places on Yelp, I’ve started getting blind to those ratings.

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Foursquare launching local search engine for everyone, not just registered users

Ryan Kim — Mon, 15 Oct 2012 17:05:10 +0000

While Foursquare has evolved over the last two years to become more of a local search and recommendation engine with its Explore feature, the benefits have been limited to logged-in users, first on mobile and then on the desktop website. Now Foursquare wants to become an open local search tool with a redesigned desktop home page that allows non-members to search for local listings and get recommendations on nearby restaurants, bars and businesses.

Web users who visit Foursquare.com later on Monday will get the ability to use Foursquare’s Explore search tool without logging in, just like anyone can use Yelp or Google, the company confirmed following an earlier report by Greg Sterling. That’s who Foursquare will be competing with as it grows into a local search engine, part of Foursquare’s overall transformation from a location-based game to a data-driven local resource.

“One of the challenges is to get people to think about Foursquare less as points and badges and more about local search and discovery,” Foursquare co-founder and CEO Dennis Crowley told me in an interview Monday. “We really see Foursquare as reinventing ourselves with local search and recommendations. We’ve been telling users for a long time and now we can tell the same story and illustrate it for folks.”

Previously, Foursquare built Explore recommendations for users based on their check-in activity and those of their friends. But with almost 3 billion check-ins and 30 million tips, Foursquare now believes it can provide helpful and relevant recommendation and search results for anyone, even if they’ve never checked in. That’s important because not everyone likes checking in.

Foursquare will look at what’s popular in a particular area, what’s trending, where experienced users go and what’s popular based on the time of day and week. Foursquare will tap its tips data to steer people to particular menu and product items that are mentioned a lot.

There’s still an incentive to sign up: Foursquare members will have more tools at their disposal such as filters for finding new places, places that friends have been to and places with specials. The filters will still appear for non-members but if clicked, they will prompt a visitor to download Foursquare’s mobile app.

“For people who have a limited understanding about Foursquare, we want to show them all the interesting things we can do with their data,” Crowley said. “We see the web as gateway drug to get people up and running on mobile.”

But Crowley said opening Foursquare.com benefits a much wider audience. It recently partnered with Open Table to make it easy for people to make reservations from Foursquare.

And it shows how Foursquare is poised to become a potentially profitable company. As we discussed earlier, Foursquare is seeing good early results with its first advertising product called promoted updates for mobile users. But as it opens up, Foursquare can target a much wider audience beyond its current 25 million members. It won’t have as much data on these users but it can still understand a lot of user intent and that’s valuable to local advertisers since local searches often lead to purchases. Foursquare told FastCompany that 20 percent of people who search for places on Foursquare end up checking in there within three days.

That could lead Foursquare to create an AdWords-like product for the desktop website that could compete more with Google. It’s still early in the evolution for Foursquare and it’s clear that the service has to battle some older notions about its emphasis on games and check-ins. But with the new open approach to the home page, which will probably be repeated on the mobile apps at some point, Foursquare is showing it can be a powerful local search engine.

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Square launches web directory to find local merchants

Ryan Kim — Wed, 03 Oct 2012 15:25:13 +0000

Square is turning its website into more of a consumer-facing local discovery tool with the launch of Square Directory, which highlights stores that take Square and Pay with Square payments. Users who visit Squareup.com/directory can view nearby businesses on a map or organized in a list. There’s a search function that lets people find particular businesses.

The directory has more than 200,000 venues, but it’s still far less than the 2 million people that Square says can accept payments. That’s probably because many Square merchants are not tied to a single place or business address. The directory is similar to the one found in the Pay with Square mobile app, with business information and menu items listed. And it continues Square’s move toward being more of a consumer-facing service: Square’s website used to be focused much more on merchant services.

The Square Directory won’t be taking down Yelp, Google or Foursquare anytime soon. There are no reviews though businesses can advertise special offers through their listings. But as the directory grows, it can be a better resource for its merchants who want to drive more traffic and another tool for people looking to find local services. That’s one of the opportunities for payment services such as LevelUp, PayPal and Google Wallet: they can become local discovery engines for people who start their searches via a payment app.

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