When I look at all the possible locations I can check into in my area, I see locations like Becky’s Apartment, Joe’s Place, or Hot Dog Cart at 33rd & Broadway. They aren’t very descriptive nor do I consider them actual locations. Someone I follow on Twitter recently checked into a specific gate at Liberty International Airport. Yes, a gate. So when I’m trying to check into a legitimate location, I have to sift through all the fake ones and it bothers me.

First of all, with all the concerns about geolocation and the safety/privacy risks associated with broadcasting your location, would you actually create a location with your real address on it? Now maybe Becky didn’t put her apartment number down when she (or someone else) created that entry but if someone wanted to find her, it wouldn’t be hard to pick her out of a residency list like this one:

M Lee
D Jones
E Thomas
B Smith

Secondly, I don’t understand how someone can check into a location that has the ability to move. The halal food cart at the corner of the street isn’t a location… the corner is. If one day you move the cart, the business still exists, its just at some other corner. So I suppose you can check into a street corner but then you look like a… well, you look shady.

Lastly, micro locations within a location also seems like overkill. In addition to the airport gate, I’ve seen locations named after swings and slides in playgrounds – not the playground name, mind you… the swing set. I can understand checking into an airport terminal. I can understand checking into Sheeps Meadow instead of Central Park. But I can’t imagine the very granular “left tree next to the twisty slide” as being a valid location. Its as if people are gaming the game to get points and mayorships.

But its not just Foursquare. Gowalla has the same thing – in fact, they were the first service where I noticed “fake” locations. Brightkite is the same and the others will suffer from the same problem, too. Its not going to keep me from using the services but it certainly takes away from the fun. If I have to sort through 10 fake locations just to find the right one, it because too much of a hassle to check in and I stop using the service; I’ve attempted to check in to locations but gave up after sifting though so many fake entries.

Having these superfluous entries isn’t going to make me give up on LBSN sites (yet). But if it gets more crowded and it isn’t addressed, I’ll probably ditch the services until they’re cleaner. But I’ll be glad to help! I’m in support of crowd sourcing the cleaning of the database.

You know where I am, Foursquare.

I wish I had the iPhone 3GS so I could take a video of this jackass rap to his headphones in the middle of a crowded 4 Train.

Don’t get me wrong. I love having the app on my phone as I can rattle off a post if I want. It comes in handy if I want to moderate comments, too. But design decisions have made the app burdensome, slow, and has limited the value such am offering would normally provide.

The first things that gets me is the need to syncronize all your comments, posts, and settings for every blog you use with the app. I have four blogs set up on the app and the communicating that takes place on load prevents me from navigating around the app. Yes! If the app is talking to the server, I can’t write a post, moderate comments or move to another blog! It’s crazy. I don’t know why I need to automatically sync on load and I don’t know why I can’t use the app while it’s loading.

The other thing that gets to me is the comment moderation: there is no “select all” feature. I don’t get many comments on the site (yet). But I get a ton of spam comments that need moderation. It would be nice if the app had a button which would let you select all the items in moderation. Or, at the least, have some settings to help deal with the hundreds of messages I have to review each day.

The last thing that I wish the app had – which I can’t say is a design flaw at all – is an intelligent compsing screen with an HTML editor or some kind of process which auto formats URLs and easily let’s me apply tags like and . I also think it would be nice if the app had a built in browser you can use to move back and forth between sits you want to write about and the post you’re writing. It would make copying and pasting quotes or links a lot easier. While the HTML an browser ideas might seem seperate, I think they go hand in hand with an enhanced composing experience that I hope to have.