Tuesday, July 13, 2010

411Square - Your FourSquare Checkins History Map

FourSquare.com has become one of the fast growing location-based social networking service, its web and mobile application allow registered users to connect with friends and update their location by checking in existing venues, and users can leave tips comments on every check-in to earn badges and mayorships. I am a big fan of Foursquare, I just earned my World Cup 2010 badge couple days ago -

FourSquare offers an API which supports OAuth Authentication and allow developers to retrieve users' check-in history and venues information. Since Google is encouraging developers to upgrade the applications using Google Maps API to upgrade from V2 to V3, I have decided to rewrite my old PHP-based FourSquare History Map application to a GAE-based(Google App Engine) application with the new Google Maps V3 API, and change the authentication method from user id/password to OAuth.

The application is hosted at 411square.appspot.com which requests a Google account to login, since it is used to save users' OAuth credibility -
click at "LOG on" to log in your Google account -
If this is your first time login, the user preferences page will be displayed and you will required to update your profile data before going to get OAuth authentication.

Click at "Update" button and then click at "Get Authorization" link to allow this application to access your Foursquare information.





Once you finish the OAuth process, by clicking at "History" you can see all your check-ins history up to 1000 records (can be changed by the preferences setting). The upper part showing the detail listing of the check-ins history and the data can be sorted by clicking at the header of the table. If you click at the row of the listing you can see the marker information pop-out on the map below.
The lower part is the map showing all the check-ins' venues, you can click at the marker to get more detail and by clicking at the icon you can open the venue page at Foursquare.com.


This application also offers the friends' current locations on map, click at "Friends" link you can see list of your friends' latest check-in venues, a Google Map under will show their Foursquare icons on the locations.