Foursquare Not Flattered By Yelp Check-Ins

Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery. But Foursquare doesn’t seem too tickled by Yelp’s newest feature.

On Friday, Yelp fired a major shot across the bow of the location-based services with the launch of the latest version of its iPhone app. The app’s big new feature is the ability to check-in at venues in cities, which is of course exactly what Foursquare is built around. But plenty of other services also have that feature such as Gowalla and now Loopt. What Foursquare doesn’t seem too happy about is Yelp’s check-in leader board, specifically.

A couple days ago, Foursquare co-founder Dennis Crowley took a screen capture of Yelp’s leaderboard and posted some commentary about it to his Tumblr blog. He quickly removed the post and made the picture private, but at least one other Tumblr blog used the service’s quick re-blog feature to capture Crowley’s post:

Shameless. At least innovate on top of it!:

Most any foursquare user will tell you our leaderboard is flawed. It tracks the wrong metrics; it encourages fake checks & cheating; etc. We’ve been hustling these past few months to build the infrastruture that allow us to tweak the game mechanics on our end (think: Leaderboard 2.0)

Poor guys, you copied the wrong stuff! :)

Them’s fightin words. Crowley also included a picture of Yelp’s check-in screen, which does look a lot like Foursquare’s (see picture at the top).

Also worth noting is that a new version of Foursquare’s leader board is apparently coming shortly. We noted they were tweaking the point system that underlies part of the gaming aspect of the service a couple weeks ago.