"Recommend Everything" Goes Viral

Dennis Crowley, foursquare CEO, speaks at LeWeb Paris 2011 at Le 104 on December 7, 2011.

Image: Antoine Antoniol/Getty Images

At today’s LeWeb conference in Paris, foursquare cofounder and CEO Dennis Crowley hinted that check-in locations may not be as important to users as making useful recommendations after check-in, according to TechCrunch. And he doesn't just mean the best soup in a restaurant.

Crowly cited the recent release of the Save to foursquare button that gives users the ability to check in to pretty much anything. For example, check in to a book by your favorite author, and if that author ends up having coffee around the corner from you five years from now, foursquare will let you know.

“This idea of bridging the online world with the real world is the big idea here,” said Crowley. In a sign that the way users use foursquare is changing, he said that many users don’t even share their check-ins, but simply check in to receive recommendations.

New products—such as Explore, which makes recommendations to users based on friends' favorite places and even strangers with similar likes, and Radar, which recommends places near you based on your likes— have begun to produce massive amounts of data that foursquare is just now starting apply. “We’re making the app start to recommend the things you should be doing. We’re getting pretty good at it," said Crowley.

With recommendation sites such as Angie’s List and Yelp long on the market, manifest destiny seems to dictate that eventually someone would make a serious run at recommending everything.

Early this November serial entrepreneur and Digg cofounder, Kevin Rose launched his new discovery app Oink, which, like foursquare, let’s users tag and rate pretty much anything. At the time, Rose told VentureBeat, “Our main goal is to just prove out the concept that people just want to rank and rank the things around them.”

Funny thing is, Oink was already a week late. And it was a comic sketch mocking the “rank everything” concept that beat him to the punch. Take a look here to see the comedy unfold.

And so the inevitable manifest destiny of the “rank everything” phenomenon continues. And with foursquare’s 15 million global users, it looks to make a decent stand against the competition—even if one of the competitors is imaginary.

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