I’m getting rather fond of the Foursquare API at the moment and more and more with the service. In particular I’m liking the way that both the dataset and the API calls are, as the service is getting more used, becoming a bucket of sentiment and post-hoc intent wrapped around the geopoints, rather than just being the bare geopoints as it felt last year when I first played with the API. I’ve been spending bits of time over the summer thinking about how you build things on top of the Foursquare API in the way that the clever folks at Lanyrd have used Twitter as a backbone. I don’t think for a moment that this is it. It’s just a playful thing. 

Moving to Oxford makes you even more aware of walking tours than living in London did. It’s all about density of history and tourists. Oxford seems to have critical mass of both. The good tour guides have interesting things to say and are clearly very well researched. I’d love to go on one, but I really don’t like crowds and I certainly don’t like route marches. If something is interesting, I’d want to ponder a while and maybe branch off to other things it inspired. 

These two things intertwined at the weekend. I’d originally thought of going out to New York for the official Foursquare hackday. When at Artfinder it was lovely to get to know the guys there a bit better. Things conspired and I decided to stay at home. And have a hackday at home. I even went to the steps of starting when the New York one did. This was actually a good plan as I immediately got stuck and was very happily helped out by IRC from the people in New York. I set up a couple of lists and then started thinking about UI and editorial assets. What I made was a little app which let you add images and audio snippets to the items of a Foursquare List and turn it into an audiotour. 

Navigation is simple it’s a list of tours. Obviously with a little more time you could search for tours by someone, see tours from friends, see tours near to you or ones which contained predominantly museums or cafes or which contained search terms.

Picking a tour gives you a list of places in the tour. This is in the order of the list in Foursquare, obviously it would be nice to cluster them in some form of sensible geographical order.

Picking a place gives you a nice picture. A map so you know you’re there and a big play/pause button. It’s all MVP with the quality being in the images and audio. 

Clearly there could be refinements like walking directions, more maps etc and some form of in app purchase for people to buy and sell tours if that’s their thing. But for now it was just one of the three fun things I did at Foursquare hackday. I really love what Dennis and co are doing at the moment, I look forward to the next set of APIs and tools eagerly and will definitely make it to New York for the next hackday. 

Oh and I made a video. As you do.