My primary question is: Can connected apps add relevant information to venue pages?
I am a coder and avid Foursquare user. The basic information about venues is cool (location, photos, tips, etc.), but while I have my meal (in the case of a restaurant) I'd like to have more to read about the venue, such as the back-story, i.e., what's the history of the place, when was it founded, by who, and other interesting facts about the venue.
I thought connected apps would be the answer and that perhaps I could write a simple wiki to integrate with the venue page for users to provide their knowledge about the venue. But it seems from what I've read that's not the the intent of a connected app or the API. Am I correct is this assumption? And if so, can this idea be dropped into the Foursquare suggestion box? I think it would make a great value added feature - especially for us nerds who like to read.
This is a great use case for connected apps. Connected apps can reply to check-ins with up to 200 characters of text, and a link to more content. This can be used to provide additional information about the venue. Take a look at https://foursquare.com/apps/ to see examples of connected apps, and the kinds of responses they give to check-ins.
Related
I have multiple products on Amazon that are being purchased. What I would like to find out is how the buyer found the item on Amazon. Did the buyer search on Amazon? Did the buyer follow a link from a Facebook Post or Tweet?
Is there anyway to retrieve this or any similar information? I don't care if it's from Reports, the MWS API, or anywhere else.
I found an article from 2012 that claims this functionality wasn't available at that time. But perhaps things have changed.
http://www.forbes.com/sites/suwcharmananderson/2012/01/11/amazon-should-give-self-publishers-more-data/#5b1bf155368e
Amazon has no control over how someone may access a particular page. This is more or less inherent in the nature of the internet, where from any location, you can link directly to a website. Furthermore, your browser doesn't 'pass forward' so to speak your browsing history to the Amazon, so it would have no data to record in this regard.
There are certainly methods of tracking this, for instance, if you have a special link that is ONLY posted on facebook, and the link simply records the click, and forwards you to the actual listing, but that would require controlled dissemination of website links, which is basically impossible.
So.. to answer your question, it is theoretically possible, and exceedingly improbably that this information is available.
I have had a similar concept in mind, but I just cannot seem to figure out how they're doing this for the life of me. For one, crawling and scrapping is against their API TOS. Secondly, they are even pulling individual dish pictures (supposedly from instagram).
You can basically look up a dish, for example "Chicken Tikka". You will then see nearby places that serve chicken tikka and the rating for that restaurant (which Yelp allows), but to make things more complicated it shows what users over the web say about that dish and the specific restaurant.
A lot of people have asked a similar question everywhere but no one has the answers.
APIs. Many sites offer APIs to allow people to legally use their data. Yelp's is found at Yelp API overview Check out the Wikipedia article for more info.
I am trying to develop an application where users will post content. It is a user-generated application, so every post will have a location attached to it, so that it can be filtered later for other users in that area or city.
For example: say users can list books on my website to sell. Now while listing I want to provide them a text box where they can enter a location. Now the entered location should be valid, so how do I verify that?
Also after posting the book, someone else searches for a book in his location then he/she should not only get results for his location but other nearby locations too.
These are few of my questions. If someone can answer them and guide me, I'd really appreciate it. Thanks.
To verify people's location, you'll want to use the HTML5 geolocation capabilities. Take a look here for a demo: http://merged.ca/iphone/html5-geolocation
Searching nearby is a bit trickier, but there are a few options. You could use a geocoding service (Google and Bing for example both offer geocoding REST APIs) to determine if people are in the same city, zip code, etc. Perhaps a better solution is to use database queries to search for nearby posts. Many databases now offer built-in geospatial data types to support exactly this kind of scenario. MySQL for example: http://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/5.0/en/mysql-spatial-datatypes.html
David of the foursquare-support-Team directed me here to leave my question for answering here...
We are currently thinking about publishing our own venues on foursquare - about 1000 of them and more to come. We would love to offer a mayor special like "50% off the bill".
Getting the information, that the mayor just checked in: No problem here - already tried to implement that and it works.
But as we are going to give money away with our 50%-special, we absolutly need to be shure, that the person who checked in is certainly inside the venue.
The current fraud-detection does not work good enough for us - today I checked into one of our test-venues, when I was about 25km away. No good :(
Here is one solution I would love to see implemented at foursquare to solve our problem:
If "trusted checkins" are enabled, the venue can still be visited by searching for it or using its URL. When checking in this way, you are awarded the regualr points, but you cannot gain any mayorship or badge (like when checking in via the mobile foursquare website).
By using an API-call, a trusted-checkin-id is generated (for example venueid_token), that can be displayed to the user by a QR-Code, NFC-Tag, etc. When this special venue-id is opened, checkins are "trusted" and are rewarded with mayorships, etc.
Upon calling the same function again, a new trusted-checkin-id is generated (venueid_newtoken). Using this new id to checkin, you get all the benefits. Using one of the old special-checkin-id, will not give you those perks.
Of course, trusted-checkin-ids can only be generated by an account associated with the venues in question.
Using this - I think quite simple system - we could present our users QR-codes to checkin and be shure, they cannot cheat.
Additionally, the beauty of this soultion is, that it won't require any change in the mobile applications already deployed by foursquare. Everything can be done directly on the foursquare-servers.
I would love to hear from you girls and guys at foursquare-engeneering-hq.
Cheers,
Martin
Users are able to check in to venues anywhere, but if they're physically far away the check-in won't count towards specials unlocks or the mayorship. So while your check-in "succeeded," it didn't actually contribute towards you unlocking the special in any way.
These check-ins also don't count towards the merchant statistics, so you can look at the merchant dashboard for the venue and confirm that the "far away" check-in was not counted.
Actually, this is how Foursquare works. They allow to checkin from far away. There's currently no know way (at least for me) to avoid it. Could you please explain in more detail, what are these 1000 venues you're going to add and why do you need this 50% major-bonus for all of them?
The only way I could think off to do what you want is to create a custom application that would use FS api to post checkins, etc, but will have additional check based on location and some custom equivalent of mayorship. Basically that's what we've done to avoid fake checkins - additional location check inside of our app.
I'm looking to pull some information off of the people that check into my location to learn a bit about them. The plan is to offer them a special through foursquare once they've completed the form. Has anyone done this? Is it even possible?
See https://foursquare.com/business/merchants/claiming for information about claiming your venue and https://developer.foursquare.com/overview/merchants for the relevant API endpoints.