Best of foursquare hackathon 2.0
Foursquare held their second hackathon over the weekend. This was a much larger affair than the last one, with more than 50 apps submitted by developers around the world. At least 25 hackers worked on their projects all through the night to have them ready to present on Sunday.
Being a longer event, this hackathon produced many more working products that you can actually use today. You can browse the entire list on the voting site built by foursquare’s interns. Here are a few of my favorites:
Venue Machine lets verified venue owners sign up to receive SMS notifications anytime a user with a Klout score above a certain threshold checks in. The idea is that the manager can then be sure to provide extra attention to that customer to make sure they have a positive experience.- How _______ Are You? compares the locations of your recent checkins against Census data to answer questions like “How black are you?” and “How married are you?” It tabulates the statistics for the ZIP codes you’ve visited and calculates an average percentage for each question based on the number of times you’ve checked in there. Based on my recent checkins, I’m 51% married, for instance. It’s the People’s Choice winner and was created by Tal Safran and Max Stoller, who built donteat.at, a site that warns you when you check in at a restaurant with a poor health inspection rating.
- One More Check-in lets you know how many more checkins you need to earn each badge. It even shows the percentage of checkin requirements you’ve completed.
- AroundMe searches either your past checkins or recommended venues for things like nearby news stories, photos and tweets. It’s a cool way to browse what’s going on around the places you visit.
- HoppinorNot provides a quick way to tell if a venue has a lot of people checked in or not. You search by venue name and the answer is returned by a set of increasingly happy bunny icons.
- Plan Your Next Trip builds an itinerary for a two day trip to any city in the world based on foursquare’s Explore recommendations (which are tailored specifically to you). I tried it for Cincinnati and the suggestions were pretty good.
- PlaceFace automatically changes your profile picture based on the category of your most recent checkin. If you check in at a bar, for instance, you can set it to a picture of you drinking a beer, while an arts & entertainment checkin might show you in your opera singer costume. I can see people having a lot of fun with this one.
- Sqavenger lets you build and participate in scavenger hunts using foursquare venues. You can set up clues for each venue that participants will receive via text message.
There are other apps that still aren’t completed — including a few waiting for approval in the iTunes app store — that we’ll be covering over the coming weeks.
Which app is your favorite?
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I’m offended by “how _______ are you?” the app said I’m 5% Asian. I need to move to SF Chinatown area? LOL
Just tried using the “One more check in” and Im currently on minute 10 of “Loading”
Its either at capacity, or needs a little work.
Yeah sorry about that, we are migrating the app on an other server
If you’re are experiencing troubles during loading (do you have a lot of checkins ?), try to reload the page !
It worked for me, but it’s odd how it says I have 0 checkins at parks toward the great outdoors badge. 4sqmap says I have 18 checkins at parks. I still don’t have the badge
What is a lot? I currently have 2675. I tried to reload after I posted that comment and nothing. I will try again later tho.. promise.
@5square 10000 is a lot ! It should be ok … Anyway, i’m working on a new version, hope to release it in a few hours. Can you DM me your foursquare user id / pseudo on twitter, so I can see what happened to you ? (@raildecom). Thanks
@jason : I’m working on it !
I tried loading it on firefox and IE and i left for lunch and still an hour and a half later still hasn’t loaded
Glad i’m not the only one….
Hi guys, we just released a new version that fix the loading issues
Let me know if you still have troubles with this.
You can also click on the badges to see the nearest places to unlock your badges ! Enjoy
My user name is offspring107 and I keep hanging on the loading screen.
We hope you’ll take a look at photoFWD – a simple app for forwarding your photos back to checkins.
We’re waiting on the App Store approval process too.
It sounds interesting and it’s definitely on my radar. Let me know when it’s available and I’ll take another look!
Hope you guys can check out our hackathon app that lets you discover and share the best things about places in a super short and simple way:
http://thisisbest.com
Hey guys! Thanks for talking about my app “Plan Your Next Trip”. I hope it gave you a nice planning. If you have any ideas for the app, don’t forget to send me a tweet @benjaminnetter !
I love how I did Gatlinburg and it showed me one place and said “This City is boring” LOL
LOL is the city really that boring? If it is, my app is right!
hahaha definitely not It’s one of the bigger tourist destinations in the region. If not the biggest one in Tennessee
but how active of a 4sq community is it… because Im pretty sure (if i understood correctly) its basing destinations on amount of check-ins and popularity..
Obviously you’ve never been
But I’m going to go with that reason, that its in the mountains. Cell service, not to mention data, is kinda spotty. That and you’re having too much fun to check in! 
The site is programmed to find an arts/entertainment venue as the second thing on day 1, so my guess is that there weren’t any of those in the Explore results so it just gave up. When I use 4sqMap to browse Explore there, I find a bunch of recommended venues, but none from A&E. I’ve found data service to be pretty good there, even on AT&T which sucks just about everywhere.
Thanks for mentioning VenueMachine! We’d love to get your feedback @venuemachine. And if you like it vote for us! http://bit.ly/o0QHzG