As one of the hot social-location properties, Foursquare has a wealth of information about where you go. Unfortunately, it doesn’t really offer many good ways to visualize it. In fact, Foursquare only focuses on providing a text stream of your check-ins. A new app takes that data and puts it on a map.
4mapper, built by John Wiseman, is a very simple application. Once you authorize it to use your Foursquare data (via Foursquare’s new API), it will pull your location information and place it on top of a Google Map. Your check-ins are displayed as white dots on the map. The more times you have check-in to a certain place, the larger the dot will be. Clicking on these dots will give you more information about where you checked-in. And you can zoom in on the map for better detail about your check-ins.
As I said, this is a very simple app, built on Google App Engine, but it’s interesting. It’s sort of like a heat map to show where you frequent in any given city. It’s similar to what Social Great has been doing with Foursquare data, only this is personalized, whereas that is an aggregator of data in various cities.
While Foursquare, the service, is interesting for a number of reasons, namely its gaming element and the potential business component, the geolocation data served up via the API may also prove to be a great source of some new apps. After coding this using Foursquare’s API, Wiseman also came up with a Python module for accessing the API. You can find that here.
