Today Foursquare announced that its API now has 10,000 registered developers. That’s an impressive number, especially since Facebook and Google were supposed to have killed the service off by now. But what exactly are all those developers doing with the API?
Marshall Kirkpatrick, our resident geolocation buff, asked around our virtual water cooler “Where are the magic results? Where is the TweetDeck of Foursquare? Where is the crazy awesome data analysis?”
Sponsor
To be fair, the TweetDeck of Foursquare is probably actually TweetDeck. But I’ve expressed disappointment before over unfulfilled potential of Foursquare’s horde of location data.
Foursquare is highlighting application integrations – most notably Instagram, which uses Foursquare for its location component, and its competitor PicPlz. But there’s also an directory of appsbuilt with the API, most of which I’ve never heard of.
There’s Sonar and StreetSpark, which both help you connect with people nearby. There’s Locc.us, an iPhone app that shows you nearby locations from Yelp, Flickr photos taken nearby and more (who needs Color if you’ve got this app?).
Those of you who have been checking in to places on a daily or near daily basis for over a year might get a kick out of this app, which will show you where you checked in a year ago to the day.
Some of the apps and integrations are baffling – why would I want to check into Foursquare from SoundCloud? But there’s obviously a strong developer ecosystem here, and it doesn’t to be just being used to offer discounts and promotions (though companies are finding increasingly clever ways to do that too).
Maybe the sort of mind blowing, world changing geodata mashup app that Marshall and I dream of doesn’t exist yet (or maybe it does and we just haven’t found it), but there are some cool things being done with the API. What’s your favorite use so far?
0 Responses
Stay in touch with the conversation, subscribe to the RSS feed for comments on this post.