agitcraft

At least that’s how I feel about it right now. Why am I giving it up? Was I somehow offended by the company? Has the service changed in a way I don’t like? Am I switching to a competing location service?

I’ve decided that I don’t (personally) see the value of location services. In a way this is the reverse of my relationship with Twitter: initially I thought it was useless, but now I’ve grown to find it quite valuable.

There are a number of reasons for this which I feel are worth mentioning:

1. Whipping my cellphone out, loading up an app, and clicking through multiple menus just to let a website know where I hang out is on the one hand distracting, and on the other hand somewhat socially rude.
2. Adding a venue to the service is too cumbersome and requires too much information.
3. Venue redundancy is rampant. Should I check into my coworker’s desk, the first building of my office, or my office in general? All three exist on Foursquare. Should I check into all three? Really?
4. Location services don’t add any value to my social experience. If I want to know who else is at my venue I’ll just look around. If I want to know if my friends have been there I’ll ask them.
5. Foursquare deleted my “Up Your Butt and Around The Corner” venue. I may rejoin if they reinstate it.

That’s all. I’m curious to see how people go about monetizing location-awareness. I don’t think I’ve heard of any good ideas yet.

Earlier today I posted about a strange bug I was encountering while trying to parse an RSS feed of my foursquare check-ins. I posted a complaint about the issue and received a prompt reply:

bauserdotcom replied 44 minutes ago

The dates in the RSS feed aren’t wrong, technically. They’re just not formatted according to best practices.

Foursquare’s RSS feed is using 2-digit numbers for years (which is valid, but not recommended, according to the RSS 2.0 Specification). How the RSS-reading agent interprets a 2-digit year is up to the agent. Whatever software you’re using decided to interpret it as 1910, which an interesting choice, since RSS didn’t exist in 1910.

So what we have is a case of two legal-but-unwise programming approaches creating a mess. Hard to say who’s most wrong, you know?

Fair enough. This is all well and good, and if I were simply reading the items one by one I would be quite able to understand that a year of “10″ actually means 2010. The problem rears its ugly head when I try to parse these dates in Flash. Consider this selection from the constructor for Flash’s built in Date class:

yearOrTimevalue:Object — If other parameters are specified, this number represents a year (such as 1965); otherwise, it represents a time value. If the number represents a year, a value of 0 to 99 indicates 1900 through 1999; otherwise all four digits of the year must be specified. If the number represents a time value (no other parameters are specified), it is the number of milliseconds before or after 0:00:00 GMT January 1, 1970; a negative values represents a time before 0:00:00 GMT January 1, 1970, and a positive value represents a time after.

As you can see, two digit dates in the constructor for Flash’s date class are interpreted as years since 1900, not 2000. The only fix available to me is to inspect every item of the feed I’m loading (since these are being aggregated into one giant list of items) to see if the publication date is sometime in the 20th century. Great.

Of course, I’m not all sour grapes. I just posted an “idea” on Foursquare’s “Get Satisfaction” page.

Today I was working on aggregating some RSS feeds for a project I’m working on using the wonderful (if dated) as3 syndication library when I ran into something very odd. I had just added my foursquare check in feed (I am no longer on foursquare) to the list of feeds to aggregate and was examining the dates and links for each feed item to verify that they were being sorted properly. Within a date sorted list, all of my foursquare check-ins (including ones from the last couple days) were at the bottom of the list.

Thu May 26 08:14:41 GMT-0800 1910 http://foursquare.com/venue/519340
Wed May 25 12:06:31 GMT-0800 1910 http://foursquare.com/venue/519340
Wed May 25 12:03:42 GMT-0800 1910 http://foursquare.com/venue/519340
Tue Mar 29 18:54:29 GMT-0800 1910 http://foursquare.com/venue/128782
Tue Mar 29 18:53:42 GMT-0800 1910 http://foursquare.com/venue/237966
Fri Mar 25 22:39:16 GMT-0800 1910 http://foursquare.com/venue/3540
Fri Mar 25 12:23:59 GMT-0800 1910 http://foursquare.com/venue/119722
Fri Mar 25 12:23:13 GMT-0800 1910 http://foursquare.com/venue/229509
Fri Mar 25 12:22:41 GMT-0800 1910 http://foursquare.com/venue/519340
Wed Mar 9 22:49:25 GMT-0800 1910 http://foursquare.com/venue/629305
Thu Mar 3 12:54:00 GMT-0800 1910 http://foursquare.com/venue/159429
Thu Mar 3 12:53:11 GMT-0800 1910 http://foursquare.com/venue/519340
Sat Feb 12 13:14:31 GMT-0800 1910 http://foursquare.com/venue/519340
Thu Feb 3 12:26:13 GMT-0800 1910 http://foursquare.com/venue/519340
Tue Feb 1 23:24:02 GMT-0800 1910 http://foursquare.com/venue/629305
Sat Jan 29 11:58:25 GMT-0800 1910 http://foursquare.com/venue/519340
Thu Jan 27 13:03:56 GMT-0800 1910 http://foursquare.com/venue/519340
Wed Jan 26 12:03:02 GMT-0800 1910 http://foursquare.com/venue/519340
Sun Jan 23 23:10:22 GMT-0800 1910 http://foursquare.com/venue/429251
Sun Jan 23 13:16:33 GMT-0800 1910 http://foursquare.com/venue/119650
Tue Jan 18 19:09:06 GMT-0800 1910 http://foursquare.com/venue/455620
Fri Jan 14 09:19:11 GMT-0800 1910 http://foursquare.com/venue/519340
Tue Jan 11 13:49:40 GMT-0800 1910 http://foursquare.com/venue/519340
Sat Jan 8 20:51:43 GMT-0800 1910 http://foursquare.com/venue/34011
Sat Jan 8 13:01:02 GMT-0800 1910 http://foursquare.com/venue/519340

Notice anything odd there? Why are all my foursquare feed items dated 1910? Am I really going to have to add an exception to add 100 years for any feed item from foursquare? Really? I reported the issue at Foursquare’s “Get Satisfaction” page. Maybe somebody will respond?