Drinking from the Foursquare Firehose on Windows Phone 7
[Update: The source code for the app is now available on Codeplex: http://4square.codeplex.com]
Foursquare is one of the leading location aware applications out there today with a rapidly growing user base. They’re really hot right now – they exploded dramatically at SXSW this year. We take it for granted when things “just work” – I can’t recall Foursquare having any kind of downtime at SXSW in spite of the explosive usage they saw that week and this is a huge testament to their dev team that managed the required scale so well.
Some of you may have seen the Foursquare Windows Phone 7 app that was demo’d on stage at MIX last week. The app looks amazing and “critics agree” ;)
Here’s what the app looks like. For your information, it’s around 11.10pm right now on March 24, 2010, and I’m at my hotel, the Las Vegas Hilton in Las Vegas, NV for CTIA Spring.
Now this is something that’s a little different from what you may have seen before. You can see where your nearby friends are on a map. I’ll be honest with you – it was till I was using the Foursquare app on Windows Phone 7 when I first got to Vegas that I new Brett Petersel was in Vegas for CTIA. I happened to notice another pushpin on the map, clicked on it, and it was him.
Tonight he happens to be at the Benihana which is near the Hilton:
At MIX, I’d put out a teaser about the ‘Society’ tab within the app. Now, some time back, the Foursquare team told me about their firehose. I asked Naveen Selvadurai about a practical use of the firehose within a mobile app, and his response: “that’s your job! ;)” So I thought to myself – when I’m at an event, like CTIA, what I want to know is where it’s going down right now. Where are people checking in right now? So here’s how we use the foursquare firehose within the WP7 Foursquare app.
Clicking on the Society tab, takes me to this screen:
The number of checkins is a real-time view of checkins that have been accumulated in the past few minutes. Panning around on the map a little bit to see where the action is tonight:
Just a few minutes later, I refreshed the map again. I guess Aria’s the place to be at tonight (at least right now):
This application was written in C# and Silverlight and is an example of how we can push the boundaries of user experience and consuming real-time data within a Windows Phone 7 app. You like?
PS: Talk about Foursquare exploding, I saw this in the Las Vegas Hilton:
Lakshmi on 
addlink addurl on 
long nightgown on 
msigeek on 
gurupanguji on 