Foursquare and the API Addiction

Monday, 23 November 2009

If you haven't heard, Foursquare has finally come to Columbus. If you're unfamiliar with Foursquare, it's the "next big" social media service that has been slowly gaining momentum over the past several years. It has a similar feel to Twitter, but rather than ask the open ended question of "What are you doing?" it sort of centers it's focus around "Where are you?"  Foursquare users "check in" to local businesses -- or parks, or music venues, or wherever they happen to be -- and their other Foursquare friends are immediately notified. Very handy if you happen to have a friend nearby who wants to join you. Additionally, when users check in to a place, they gather up "points" toward a weekly total, plus people with the most "checkins" over a span of 60 days are declared to be the Mayor of each particular location, with some businesses offering rewards and incentives to their Mayors.  Really, to be a bit more susinct, it's one part Twitter, one part local scavenger hunt. It can get pretty addictive; I'm already the Mayor of our local coffee shop.

In addition to recently becoming available in Columbus, Fourquare also recently made a public API available to developers. If you're not a geek like me and have no idea what that sentence means, it basically means that they've opened up a really easy way for other developers like myself to access their information and do cool stuff with it.  I love wasting many hours screwing around with APIs that I find interesting.  I've recently spent a bit of time exploring the new Google Maps v3 developer tools that allow developers to make their own custom map applications, so it only made sense to me to combine Google's Maps API with Foursquare's API.

It's a bit rough around the edges, and hasn't really been bug tested at all, but if you're a Columbus Foursquare user, you can enter your username  (either your email address or phone number) and password below and get a map of Columbus with your friends plotted out around the city. Click on a marker to see who is at each point and how long they've been there.  If you're using Foursquare in another city and have any interest in something like this, let me know and I can see about making it a little more flexible to support other cities.


Tags: daily  technology 

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