Hot on the heels of Photocheck.in, a service we covered a few days ago that allows you to check-in on Foursquare simply by sending a picture, comes news that TweetPhoto is creating a platform for picture integration with Foursquare. Using TweetPhoto’s new API, any third-party Foursquare developer can add picture functionality to their site or app.
Whereas Photocheck.in is a stand-alone service that allows you to check-in via picture, this new TweetPhoto API is aiming for developers who create apps that use both Twitter and Foursquare. Because Foursquare does not allow for pictures to be placed on its site or in its check-in stream, the idea here is to leverage Twitter (which Photocheck.in can also do) to send these pictures out after their location information is filtered through a Foursquare check-in. The advantage to this is that developers will be able to query photos by Foursquare venue name. As you might imagine, this might be a cool little feature in a third-party location app.
Naturally, for this all to work, you have to send your pictures via a GPS-enabled phone (such as the iPhone or an Android device). And developers who integrate this API will also have access to TweetPhoto’s other tools such as picture commenting, voting, and adding favorites.
“We are doing what TwitPic did for Twitter for FourSquare while also continuing to take market share away from TwitPic and yFrog,” TweetPhoto Sean Callahan tells us. A quick scan of Compete shows that TweetPhoto is in fact experiencing some impressive growth compared to its rivals.
Eventually, the plan is to allow users to log-in to TweetPhoto using their Foursquare credentials, but for now this remains only an API method. If you’re a developer who is interested in learning more, read up on this documentation. You can also see a test tweet using this API here, as well as the TweetPhoto page for the picture.’
