Best of the Foursquare Hack Day

On Saturday, foursquare hosted a Hack Day at General Assembly in New York. Foursquare provided the workspace and a team of engineers to answer questions; developers brought their talents and tons of great ideas. The event lasted well into the night, but the time invested paid off with lots of interesting apps and hacks built on the foursquare API.

Some of the hacks weren’t able to be completed within the single day format of the hackathon and will be released in the coming days and weeks. Others were more or less finished in the 19+ hour marathon session. Of those, here are a few of my favorites:

Foursquare & 7 Years Ago — One of my favorite emails each month is the PhotoJojo time capsule that sends me my best Flickr photos from a year ago. It’s a great way to remember things from the past, many of which I’ve forgotten about. Foursquare & 7 Years Ago is built on the same principle. Each morning it sends you an email that lets you know exactly where you were one year ago today. I don’t know that I need it every day (coffee, office, lunch could get boring pretty quickly), but it’s a fun way to remember the interesting things I was doing at this time last year.

FourGraph — A few weeks ago when I posted an infographic review of my first year on foursquare, several readers asked me how to create their own. That one was created lovingly by hand, but developer Jean-Luc David turned it into a single-click affair during the Hack Day. It includes all your checkins on a map (or at least it will soon), your basic foursquare stats in graphic form, your badges and the number of coffees you’ve consumed (I think this is the same for everyone). It’s really a fun little application. I look forward to seeing how it grows.

Foursquare Lists — This app lets you create a curated list of foursquare venues centered around any topic. I chose “Best Breakfasts,” for instance. It would be a great way to create a list of your favorite things to do in a city that could be shared with your friends (much like the curated to-do lists I suggested in October). To create a list, you simply enter the name you want for the list and then add venues by entering their venue number. The list is automatically created with a link to the venue page on foursquare.

Badge Assistant — With this app, all your badges are overlaid on a Google Map. It’s a nice way to see your badges represented visually. You can also choose to see a map of where your friends have earned badges you don’t have. Wondering where to get that douchebag badge? This is a helpful way to see where your friends got it. If you have a lot of foursquare friends, though, exercise caution when clicking that link; the processing required for all my friends nearly shut down my computer.

Agora — I’m not really sure exactly what this app does behind the scenes, but the premise is interesting: “We use your Foursquare checkins to introduce you in real-time to people you have common interests [with] using your Twitter graph.” It will send you a tweet when it finds you’ve checked in with someone interesting.

Have you found any other apps from the Hack Day that you find interesting? Let us know about them in the comments.