Places API roundup (Foursquare v2)

Image from Foursquare Developer Portal

With 800-pound gorillas moving into the LBS ecosystem, location based social networks are fighting for survival in the post check in era. To remain relevant, one approach is to grow the user base organically faster than other social/information networks. This can be achieved by adding quickly more viral features in the native applications and web sites. The number of features and update frequency is directly related to the size the staff. Although small teams can achieve significant results and attract many users, it is a risky business. A safer approach is to attract applications and their developers on the core service API and leverage them. The developers become the innovative lifeblood to bring in more users, it unlocks the staff size limit, brings more features built on the service and mitigates the innovation risk. The approach works as long as the API offers more services than the 800-pound gorilla. In the last few weeks, Foursquare introduced a newer version of its API to attract more users with more developers Dec 9th Foursquare Announcement

Foursquare API v2

Version 1 of the API (v1) – now deprecated – provided few services available in the native Foursquare application. The version 2 (v2) is a major overhaul giving access to most features, improving performance, and dropping the verbose XML output and parsing for more lightweight REST output. In v2, the main API entry point such as users, checkins, venue, tips remain, with photo and comments added, and newly todo for tips. The big difference is a more granular API at the entry point level. A great addition is the API explorer, something that Facebook and Twitter already offered in their own way.

Users

In v2, the users node provides search, aspects (badges, checkins, friends, tips, todos, venuehistory) and actions (request, unfriend, approve, deny, settings). This is major departure from the user API available in version 1 that used to return everything. Friends who used to be available as top node are now rolled into the users.

Venues

v2 of the Venues node brings some nice additions such as the Accuracy of the users location (lat,lon,alt) and the grouping of location field into an array. An experimental herenow Aspect provides a quick overview of the venue with user count additional users information.

Checkins

Instead of providing a checkins and checkin node for read (recent) and write (add), the API now provides two distinct calls for recent and add under a single checkins node. Another change include the ability to comment on a checkin.

Conclusion

No doubts that companies like Twitter and Facebook will provide similar capabilities over time, but there are in no need to rush as just a few are experimenting with location services. While Foursquare has to rely on speed and third parties to mitigate its innovation risk, the 800-pound gorillas don’t need to. They can rely on their small team to bring what’s really important when appropriate, and leverage the scale of their user base to succeed. Game on!

-Olivier