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"In a continuing effort to reshape itself as a ratings and guide app, rather than a 'check-in' collector, Foursquare has today\u00A0added a Recently Opened section to its Explore feature in the iPhone app.\r\n\r\nThis new feature should allow users to see new locations around them including fresh\u00A0restaurants\u00A0and other items. A recent update added a 1-10 score to its listings, effectively positioning Foursquare as a Yelp competitor for\u00A0recommendations. As a newly minted recommendation engine, it only makes sense for it to help to surface newly opened locations.\r\n\r\nFoursquare founder Denis Crowley recently told students at Harvard that\u00A0\u201CFinding a great new sushi restaurant and sharing it with your friends should feel as good as unearthing the boomerang in\u00A0The Legend of Zelda.&amp;quot;\u00A0But the initial game-like functions of Foursquare that built the service's early userbase are secondary to its new recommendation goals.\r\nHere's how Crowley explains the switch to a Yelp-like service:\r\n\r\nAfter a local caf\u00E9 in San Francisco hung up flyers offering a discount to Foursquare members who \u201Cchecked in,\u201D a blogger posted, \u201CHey, I just saw the future of Yelp, and it\u2019s called Foursquare.\u201D At that moment, Crowley realized the value that both merchants and consumers could derive from his company\u2019s treasure trove of data on customer behavior.\r\n\r\n\u201CWe have three billion check-ins and an army of people crawling the real world like a web crawler would crawl the internet,\u201D Crowley said. \u201CWe have \u2018Big Data\u2019 about where people go, where they go after they go there, where they went before, where they don\u2019t go anymore\u2014there is tremendous value in all that check-in data. It is our job to harvest that.\u201D\r\nFoursquare opened up \u00A0Explore feature\u00A0to all visitors\u00A0of its website recently, even if they hadn't signed up. This effectively expanded the reach of Explore, and leveraged all of the data that it had been gathering from its signed-in users to fire up a\u00A0recommendation\u00A0engine for everyone.\r\nImage credit: AFP/Getty Images\r\nFoursquare"^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://thenextweb.com/apps/2012/11/20/foursquare-adds-recently-opened-section-to-explore-in-iphone-app/>