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Comment by pavel_lishin | Hacker News Reader

It would be nice if they open-sourced it so people could make their own maps, teams, etc.

I'm one of the developers who worked on the project. We actually have been discussing open sourcing the project for this reason.

The biggest challenge is setting up the neighborhood constraints and getting the checkins to map correctly to those constraints. But it's on our radar, and we're open to any ideas people have.

Honestly, you could probably even keep it closed-source, so long as people could design their own map overlays. I'm not sure how foursquare works for this - I actually tried to work with the API so my computer could send my girlfriend a text whenever she checked into a shoe store - but it seemed impossible.

If you were trying to discourage your girlfriend from purchasing shoes, this method would probably only discourage your girlfriend from checking in to shoe stores.

Granted; it was meant to be more of a humorous surprise for her. It also turned out to be much more of a challenge than I expected - there was no way to get a list of checkins for a friend, so I ended up setting up another account, friending her, and setting it to e-mail me whenever a friend checked in.

The plan was to use Lamson to parse these e-mails, but apparently it depended on a library that - in a minor version upgrade - totally fucked everything that depended on it by arbitrarily renaming several functions. Unless you specifically installed fucktits version 2.2 - not 2.1, and god help you if you installed 2.3 - it wouldn't work.

After three days, and help from a friend, I just tossed it all in the garbage and resigned myself to living under a pile of her shoes.

provisional +1 for when you release the source on gitHub, looks like a brilliant idea though

May I ask where you sourced your neighborhood boundary KML? I could use this.

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