alex.mullr.net/blog

This is how foursquare displays the map for CJ’s Cafe in London. They got “The Vale” part right, but it’s totally in the wrong part of the city. If you take the address including the postcode and put it in Google Maps, you’ll see that it’s actually in Acton. This is a huge problem for their site, affecting many venues (in London at least). And this makes checking in much more difficult, possibly leading to duplicate venues, and bigger problems.

For some reason, foursquare only looks up the first line of the address to map it. Not the business name, or the cross streets, or the postcode.

Guys, you have to fix this soon. For the time being, Gowalla wins.

(All these new location-based games and sites are fantastic, by the way. You should check them all out and decide which you like best. Mashable wrote a nice comparison of these two, if that’s your thing.)

Comments

By Michael Henley on 29 December 2009 at 22:23:

Never had this problem personally thanks to most of the venues I create being in Oxford but I can imagine that this is the case. I wonder why they can’t search gMaps with the venue name and strip the info from there if what you are looking for isn’t added already. Adding new venues through the iPhone app is a massive pain at the moment.