ddunlop

When I first signed up for foursquare I didn’t know many people on it and no one in New York that had checked in.  For some reason I continued to use it,  more people got on it and for a while it was interesting to see where people were and there were times I met up with people who I otherwise would not have had I not known that they were just around the block.  But one of my favorite parts of it was the data that I was collecting about where I had been, I’m always forgetting the name of the awesome bar that I went to a few weeks ago, and to have that data available to look up is quite nice.  But there is more data in there then that.

In order to get at that data I’ve been playing with the foursquare api. The first thing I did was try to determine how many bars I’d been to in the last year, based on categories the number turned out to be much larger than I had expected.  Partly because I go to bars but also because some places that are categorized as bars are also restaurants, so I may not have had a drink there, or some of my visits I may have had brunch and other times I may have been drinking.  Either way the number was in the triple digits for the past year.

The next thing I looked at was where my checkins were, I gathered up the geo data for the places I’ve checked in and counted how many times I’ve checked into each place, all very easy through the api.  I took this data and with google maps javascript api I drew a set of circles, sized based on number of checkins.  Not surprisingly many of my checkins are clustered around my apartment and office.  What did surprise me was how many places I had only been to once, and how large the circle for my closest slice joint is.  I also spotted a few places that were miss placed, I was able to fix this by sending new locations to a friend that is a super user. The image above is my checkins in south Brooklyn.