Bijan Sabet

Playing Foursquare: a few feature requests

I’m a fan of Foursquare. I’ve been using the service since July and I’m completely hooked.

As a user, I’ve been thinking about a few features I’d love to see in the product at some point. So I thought I would jot them down here.

1 - History.

A few months ago, I stumbled upon the Flour Bakery in the South End. I checked in at the time on Foursquare. Yesterday, Mo and I were in the South End meeting with a startup. After the meeting, I said, “I gotta take you to this place but I don’t exactly remember the name but they have the best macaroon cookies”. The problem was, I completely forgot what street it was located on as well.

It would be super cool if Foursquare could show me on the iphone my check-in history from my current location/neighborhood. And I’d love to see my friends history as well based on my current location at the time.

2 - Twitter Oauth

The sign up process for Foursquare couldn’t be easier. Phone number and password and you are off. They also give the option to login with Facebook Connect.

It would be great if they also offered Twitter Oauth as an option. Disqus has that option built into the commenting service so you can leave a comment on this blog using your Twitter credentials. Then, all of my Twitter profile data would exists and a bunch of interesting things could flow from there (DM in the app, recent tweets, follow/invite etc).

3 - Photos.

The Foursquare iPhone app is also a Twitter client in some ways. You can tweet your Foursquare checkins. I’d love a way to add photos to the check in as well just like other iPhone Twitter apps. Integration with twitpic, tumblr and flickr would be sweet.

* * *

The interesting thing about all of the above ideas is that in reality FourSquare doesn’t have to do any of these themselves. The Foursquare API looks really nice. So it’s quite likely that many of these things, and much more, will come from 3rd party developers which is the most powerful way to build a platform.