Is anyone aware of a way to get historical location info from Foursquare Venues. The problem is that if i look at a users checkin history and one of the venues has changed addresses, there is no way to get the old address / location via the api. For apps built on that data it means when a venue moves all the checkins prior to the move will have the wrong venue info.
Has anyone figured out a way to get that info (obviously this isnt a problem if the user has authed into our service before the change because we have it stored, but after we have no way to access it)?
There's no way to access the old location information, but information should only get strictly better with time. If you have a situation where location information for a venue has become less accurate, you should flag the venue and the super user community will try to fix it.
Related
1) I notice that Foursquare does not show all places, but other engines show places that are not yet in Foursquare, but I would like to use Foursquare API, so is there a problem showing a merged view of places from more than one engine providing attributions to both?
2) Even if I don't use both engines, but only foursquare and I create my own places (no other engine but my own), can I show a merged view of both of them?
If the above is not possible, what are my options of a location database that allows the above?
Take a look at the "Other Data" section of Foursquare's Venues Database Usage Rules. Also from the FAQ: "Every venue should come from Foursquare. You are not allowed to maintain your own repository of venues alongside those from Foursquare—you should be using us as your sole location database. If a venue is not on Foursquare, you should add it."
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.
I was reading the API policy of foursquare Venue Platform.
"You may not use the API to to add new places to your database or alter location details for places in your database."
It raised two questions to me:
1. How would they know, if one added new places, etc. to his/ her own database?
I hear that foursquare (used to) use the google maps api, to retrieve information for locations, so does that mean it is viable to use Google Map's data to create one's own basic database?
Any help is appreciated.
Basically they are telling you - you can use our API and database to create great apps, but do not steal our know-how(the database copy). They won't probably find out if you copy few of them, but say - you make a startup based on their database which you fully copied, then they can sue you and get you in trouble....
For Google usage, refer to Google Policy here.
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.