Show HN: what I coded during the Foursquare Hackathon | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: what I coded during the Foursquare Hackathon

agoraapp.com

17 pointsway6612 comments

Connect with people using Foursquare and Twitter We use your Foursquare checkins to introduce you in real-time with people you have common interests using your Twitter graph.

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I'd love to hear the concepts behind this, I'm guessing you first do a radial search from current location, yield list twitter handles, fetch last n dozen tweets, extract links, cluster, intersect, introduce.

I don't have a 4[] account to try it but im curious what you used. Obviously in 8 hours there's only limited technology that can be done, but if you're using python or another language with a rich set of libraries it's possible to do quite a lot during that time. Obviously 8 hours means 6 when you factor in HN time :)

Foursquare has a API method that exposes the people who are at the same place than you are. Then we get their twitter nicknames and find who you have the most followings in common.

We use Rails 3, Memcache, Redis, Resque, Foursquare API (with Push) and Twitter API.

Thanks, that's essentially what I said, but I am curious what you mean by "most followings in common" (you mean people intersect?) I assumed you did some form of semantic analysis of the tweet streams to intersect based on common RT's or link topics?

I'm actually surprised there is a maxima between people intersects, or that it carries some meaning.

I wasn't really asking about the front-end, that seems like any of the boilerplate environments would have been equivalent, and just becomes a matter of most familiar, but rather the 'backend'.

Let's say you can write a UI, you have a lat/lon, you have the tweet streams from those around you, how, in a meaningful way do you find similarity? That's the core of your idea. Because Mike and Brett both follow JetBlue what does that tell you? However, if Mike and Brett both RT'd a link about the speed of limit hard limit, it's reasonable to assume they have some similarity in interest. That's the part I was interested in getting your thoughts (mainly because its something I've both thought about and worked on)

Try to run some computation on top of Twitter using the followings in common and you'll see that it's actually working great. We only display with whom you have more than 4 followings in common.

Well done, but it looks awfully similar to DontEat.at. ;)

I was also at the hackathon. A couple of friends and I hacked together a lists feature: http://foursquare.heroku.com.

Thanks! DontEat.at tries to solve a different problem. They send you a SMS when you checkin at a place that health violations.

I only coded during the Foursquare Hackathon. Not before. Which means 1pm to 9pm.

Very cool idea. Will it only work with people participating in the app, or anyone that has a twitter attached to their Foursquare account?

(As long as I participate in the app, of course.)

Really neat idea. You should explain the backstage though, for a less deceptive experience.

I like that app, it's wise use of API's to mashup a feature like that...

I actually made two cool connections through it. Good job, Pierre!

Great! Happy to help you meet new people!

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