Last week at the SES conference Yusuf Mehdi announced our partnership with foursquare and demonstrated a preview of the application that I’ve had the personal privilege of managing – woohoo! After much anticipation, I’m proud to present to you “foursquare Everywhere” – a new Bing Maps application that pulls foursquare data into Bing Maps to visualize check-ins, tips, badges and mayor coronations from the foursquare APIs. This application has gotten A LOT of buzz, so without further ado I give you Bing Maps’ foursquare Everywhere…

First off, we’re flighting the application to a certain set of users so if you don’t see it in the application gallery don’t feel sad. Your time will come. The concept of foursquare is based on the idea of “checking in” to a location that gets shared with the community and your community of friends. You do all of this from your mobile device and the location that you checked into gets shared across your friends network. As of today, you can see where all these people are checking in on a Bing Map. On loading the map, you’ll see tips from users who have tagged a specific location with additional contextual information. Then, you’ll see a massive stream of information flowing onto the map and in the panel to the left. The data includes check-ins (where people are), tips (user input about a location), badge awards (where people have earned a foursquare badge) and mayorships (where people have become the mayor).

There’s a check box near the bottom of the application that is simply addicting. Check the box to “auto-center the map on new updates” and watch the map fly around the world as people check in everywhere! Very addicting to watch the animations bounce on the map as they load. If you’re not seeing data on the map, chances are you’re zoomed into an area where people aren’t playing foursquare so either move the map or zoom out. Within the stream you can click on locations to highlight (with a spin) on the map. If you click on one of the pieces of data pinned to the map you’ll get a popup with the name of the location which you can click to zoom down. You can also view the location on foursquare.com.

Want to search through the foursquare venue list? Click the search tab and search away. You can enter venue names, places or tags and we’ll search through foursquare to find a match. If you want even more detail, you can login to foursquare via the “Friends” tab. 

 

I have to give much props to my friends at Earthware who absolutely rocked the development effort for this app. Go sign up for foursquare and join in the fun.

CP – Follow me on Twitter @ChrisPendleton