Steven Lehrburger

Where Do You Go

Visualize your Foursquare check-ins as a heat map and share the places you go!

http://www.wheredoyougo.net/

Classes
Mashups: Remixing the Web


Where Do You Go provides Foursquare users with a dynamic heat map of the places they have visited on top of a standard Google Maps interface. Users can create snapshots of their maps and hotlink them as static URLs on their personal webpages, or they can use the simple WDYG wrapper pages to share their maps on Twitter. The maps will self-update automatically in the background as users continue to visit new places and check in with Foursquare.

(Note that user privacy is protected because recent data is not shown and because individual check-ins are aggregated into an imprecise heat map.)

http://lehrblogger.com/2010/03/19/where-do-you-go/

Background
Inspired partially by http://socialgreat.com/. http://4mapper.appspot.com/ and http://www.checkoutcheckins.com/ offer similar but not equivalent functionality and were completed and released after I started the project.

Audience
Foursquare users who want a low-maintenance way to visualize and share there social/location information online.

User Scenario
A visitor at the show would approach my kiosk. If the person was a Foursquare user, I would walk them through the signup process on my application's website, which would generate a heat map of their personal data for them to use. If the person was not a Foursquare user, I would explain both applications and show example visualizations.

Implementation
Written in Python and hosted on Google App Engine, uses the Google Maps and Foursquare APIs, relies heavily on code adapted from the gheat-ae Google Code project, uses Mike Knapp's OAuth library from github, uses jQuery and BlueprintCSS for the front-end.


Conclusion
Even simple web applications are hard to build to be robust, scalable, and ready for a larger audience.