Make your foursquare history useful with Rewind.me

There are a lot of different reasons I use foursquare. The tips and recommendations are at the top of that list, but keeping a personal history isn’t far behind. Foursquare’s display of your history is pretty simple, forcing you to go through pages of check-ins to find anything useful. A new iOS app launching today makes that easier, but it’s just the first step in Rewind.me‘s goal to unlock the power of your foursquare history.

“We believe that your personal history is an asset,” said Rewind.me founder and CEO Craig Danuloff. “But while apps like Foursquare make it easy and fun to keep track of what you’ve done, there hasn’t been a good way to take advantage of your own past. We’re changing that – so you can get what you’ve earned and what you deserve wherever you go.”

Rewind.me’s Foursquare Edition launched today (since it is 4sqDay and all). It pulls in your foursquare history and lets you sort through it in a number of interesting ways. You can see the conventional date view, which lets you scroll back through or jump to any date in your history to see the places you checked in. A category view shows you all the places you’ve visited in a particular category.

It’s the location view, though, that’s the most useful of all. You can filter it by distance to see just the places you’ve visited nearby, so you’ll be able to remember the name of that Italian restaurant you ate at when you were last in this neighborhood two years ago.

Data from your friends’ histories is also shown in the app, as long as they’re using Rewind.me and have opted in specifically to that feature (they’ll only see data you’ve already shared with them on foursquare; Rewind.me just goes back farther). If you’re traveling in a friend’s hometown it’s easy to pull up the app and see the sushi restaurant they visit most often, for instance.

The Foursquare Edition is very useful in itself, but really represents Rewind.me’s first step toward their goal of becoming a real-world version of Klout to help you get the treatment you deserve from businesses. The foursquare histories of their users will help to determine a scoring algorithm that Rewind.me can then pitch to businesses based on a user’s expertise with certain kinds of places. You’ll be able to see how you stack up against your friends or the Rewind.me community as a whole in various areas of expertise.

Their hope is that in the future, you might not have to hunt down your friend’s favorite sushi restaurant. That restaurant would know you’re in town and seek you out — maybe even offering a discount — based on your experience eating at great sushi places and your willingness to share that with your friends.

As a data nerd, I’ve been looking for something like what Rewind.me is offering today for a while. It makes it easy to browse through your foursquare history and glean information from your own past. It’s what they’re planning for the future, though, that has me even more excited. Foursquare calculates my experience for the purposes of creating Explore recommendations, but there’s no way for businesses to take advantage of that and cater to me specifically. Rewind.me’s plan could make that a reality in the not-too-distant future.

Rewind.me is free in the iTunes app store. Give it a try and let us know what you think in the comments.

After the jump: a video from Rewind.me showing the app in action.