Manchester in the UK is the world’s rudest English-speaking city, according to Foursquare, based on the amount of swearing in check-in recommendations.
In a post on the company’s engineering blog, ‘proud British midlander’ Matthew Rathbone explains that the company has been experimenting with ways of analyzing the data it has at its disposal.
http://engineering.foursquare.com/2011/02/28/how-we-found-the-rudest-cities-in-the-world-analytics-foursquare/
“Until recently, our data was only stored in production databases and log files. Most of the time this was fine, but whenever someone non-technical wanted to do some data exploration, it required them knowing scala and being able to query against production databases,” he says.
“This has become a larger problem as of late, as many of our business development managers, venue specialists, and upper management eggheads need access to the data in order to inform some important decisions.”
One wonders what decisions needed to be made on the basis of a city’s rudeness – where to hold the company’s next Christmas party, perhaps – but, whatever the reason, Rathbone decided to find out.
Manchester comfortably topped the list, followed by El Paso, Pittsburgh and Bloomington. But Californians clearly need their mouths washing out with soap and water, with Riverside, Venice, Orange, Culver City, Fullerton and Los Angeles all featuring in the top 20. Apart from Manchester, Melbourne is the only non-US city to feature.
Some of the blog’s readers are less than happy with their designation.
“As a Mancunian I find your results a total load of crap. You could not run an analytical analysis correctly. You need to get your fat arse’s [sic] over here and actually meet the people,” says Jacoliame – later claiming that the comment was intended to be ironic.
And Al from El Paso also begged to disagree.
“I just moved to El Paso from San Francisco and for you to say that El Paso is the second rudest city in the world, you must be “NUTS” you are identicle [sic] to Mens Health Magazine, just a bunch of biased prejiduce [sic] idiots,” he says.
Perhaps Foursquare’s next bit of data analysis will be to investigate the world’s worst spellers.
