One of the reasons Foursquare has been able to grow its venue database so large so quickly is because they’ve made it so easy to add new venues. The downside of that is that there are a lot of duplicate venues in the system. Dupes can be flagged by users and then removed or consolidated by admins or super users but it’s not clear how efficient it is. One of the things Foursquare could do to prevent this from being a problem for users is to better surface whether you’ve been to a venue or not.
Above are two screenshots of Foursquare - they’re both of a pizza place in Englewood, NJ. The one from the iPhone is a dupe with very few check-ins but it’s not that easy to tell this (yes, in this example there is no mayor but dupes can have mayors too). In webOS when you click into a venue the app shows you whether you’ve been the venue or not (this screenshot is of the correct venue). This is really helpful but it would be better if it was surfaced at the venue screen so I didn’t have to click in to verify.
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