I think Foursquare is great, and I think that it’s soon to spur a bunch of services built on top of it (and not in a Social Great way; I think in more applicable and useful ways). In it’s current state, I like it, but don’t love it. I think it’s got a lot going for it and lots of places it can go.

What I think is Foursquare’s secret sauce is it’s ability to point out places I’d enjoy. Right now, I don’t find the tips to be useful and the tips that I do read, I’m not sure who the person recommending them is, so I don’t trust them like I maybe should. I still use Yelp for that, even though I don’t like that service since I don’t know anyone recommending me a coffee shop to try.

Check-ins are fine, but I don’t (necessarily) care where you, my friends, have checked-in. The only reason I care about that information is if I’m out and want to meet up with you, but frankly if I wanted to meet up with you I would have called/emailed/texted you. That information really does nothing for me, personally. It could be very valuable to brands – and, as we’re seeing, it is.

I find myself in different cities constantly, and exploring new places is fun for me. Where I get frustrated is when I try a new place and it’s a complete stinker. And this is where I want Foursquare (or something built on top) to step in.

One thought I’ve had is to build a way to email me all my check-ins for the past week where I’m asked to fill out a tip. I could do this from my computer anytime I felt the need. Completing a tip on my phone just isn’t practical. And, if a place stunk, I could say so, and my network would know about it.

My prediction is that there will be services built on top of Foursquare to help create small tribes of like-minded users to point to trusted and reputable places to visit/eat/drink. It’s the trust and personal web that I’m missing from Foursquare and desperately want.

I’m in the process of building an online community and want to be able to take it somewhat offline. Enter an app built on top of Foursquare where I segment the users from “my” community on Foursquare and encourage recommendations to create a listing of “my” approved places, which I think adds that element of trust to the reviews. Make sense? Thoughts?

As I think about it, it makes sense for Foursquare to build a lists function (like Twitter!) to handle this for us.

Tags: foursquare, internet, social media

Foursquare Sub-Communities with Trusted Recommendations was posted on Monday, February 15th, 2010 at 13:21 and is filed in Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.