Foursquare Says I Have Too Many Friends
I’ve been on Foursquare for a long time. Since nearly the beginning I guess. But all good, or even mediocre, things must come to an end. So I’ve said goodbye. Permanently.
They’ve Had Plenty of Time to Fix This
No one can say I didn’t give them a shot. According to Fourquare, I checked in 487 times. And I had 1,000 friends. Exactly 1,000 friends. Why not more? After all, over 80,000 people follow me across various social networks. Well, because according to Foursquare:
Whoa, that’s a lot of friends. Remember, on foursquare, you can only have 1000 friends.
I guess someone over there thinks that 1,000 is a lot? I mean, it IS a lot! But why is that a problem? Even on LinkedIn I have a couple thousand professional contacts. And I don’t even try and connect with everyone I know from the business world.
The Problem With Limiting Your Users
There are three problems with imposing an arbitrary limit on the number of friends one might have:
- Service providers shouldn’t impose limits. They should be facilitators, not roadblocks. Over time I expected them to remove this limit. Maybe it was an infrastructure problem? But no. They’re apparently just philosophically opposed. Like the 140 character Twitter limit.
- Services like Foursquare benefit from additional connections. If I check in at a place and I only have 50 friends, the odds of one being nearby to join me are very, very slim. If I have 50,000, the odds are… well 1,000 times greater. And I thought the promise of Foursquare was to help connect with people while we’re out in the real world?
- Foursquare allows people to continue sending me friend requests, even though they don’t allow me to accept them! That just makes me look like a douchebag! They make ME the badguy! I can’t accept, and I can’t even respond! Requests just keep piling up over time.
They Make Exceptions – But Not For Me
Some of you might just ask why I don’t reach out to Foursquare and get them to fix this for me? Well, I tried. Cali Lewis, Myself, and Geek Beat staffers have all attempted to contact Foursquare several times to get them to convert my account over to being like Cali’s account. For some reason, she’s allowed to have Friends and FOLLOWERS!
But not a single person from Foursquare ever replied to any of us. Not once. (And they supposedly have over 100 employees.)
By the way, I don’t see why they would allow only a handful of people to have their accounts set up like Cali anyway. EVERY account should have the option of allowing followers. If they did that, perhaps the 1,000 friend limit wouldn’t be so bad. Though it would still be wrong. I purposely haven’t promoted Foursquare ANYWHERE because it just generates additional friend requests, who then never see me connect.
So, to the 1,000 of you who followed me on Foursquare and who enjoyed my updates over the past few years – I’m sorry to be abandoning you. From now on I’ll be doing all of my checkins on Google+. Where they allow an unlimited number of connections.
Because unlimited > 1,000. And that makes Foursquare irrelevant in my opinion.
Google Plus has a 5000 limit. These limits may seem restrictive from the perspective of the user, but it serves a practical purpose from the perspective of a backend developer. There are two ways to generate a list of the activity that you follow on a social site. The first method is to iterate through all recent activity and select only the ones relevant to you. This can take an unacceptably long period of time if there are millions of users on the site, because the scan may require looking through hundreds of millions of entries to find the ones that are relevant to you. The alternative method, which has become the prevailing standard for large social sites, is to prepopulate a list of what is relevant to you. This is done via a reverse lookup of who follows the activity of the person who is posting it, and a link, id, reference, etc. gets added to the individual list of each of the followers. This makes retrieval nearly instantaneous, but adding new data takes more time. The amount of time depends on how many followers someone has. By limiting the number of followers/friends, computation time is limited to what is considered acceptable. It is possible to set up a queue and perform a background process to prepopulate these lists, but that very significantly increase the amount of work that a developer has to do, which means deadlines are likely to be missed.
It’s worth noting that Facebook also has a 5K friend limit.
Services such as Foursquare are designed as personal services, so you can’t blame them for focusing on providing a solution that is core to their values.
Having lots of people that you don’t actually know as connections weakens the purpose of the service.
Similarly, following thousands of people on twitter renders your twitter feed useless as it will be full of ‘waffle’, which you can’t possible read. Instead you should use Twitter lists in order to group people.
It’s like you’re trying to drive a Prius as a race car – you’re trying to use a service for something other than it was intended. You can’t blame Toyota.
Twitter has a 140 character limit because tweets are designed to fit within an SMS. SMS’s have a limit of 160 characters, so tweets have a limit of 140 characters, plus they allow another 20 characters for the sender username, etc.