Foursquare gets into the recommendation engine business →
Jennifer Van Grove, VentureBeat:
Chances are that the insights gathered from one-and-a-half billion check-ins and 15 million tips are better than your own eyes and ears at sleuthing out the best places to eat, drink and see nearby or afar. At least that’s the logic and science behind Foursquare Explore, a popular recommendation feature migrating from mobile to web today.
While this is an interesting move, Foursquare doesn’t collect any metadata about how much people like what they’re checking into—they can only quantize how popular a place is based on the number of checkins and tips. So it’s not actually giving you “recommendations” the way a site like Yelp can. The sixty-eight Starbucks within a five mile radius of your current location all have a lot of checkins, but they’re probably not what you’re looking for when you want to explore coffee shops. (And is it really that helpful to be told, when looking for Chinese restaurants, “People who go to Starbucks tend to go here?”)
