We’ve written about Foursquare a number of times. It’s a really nice tool for keeping track of where your friends are, while at the same time playing this oddly competitive social game. As a stand-alone app, it’s great. But the data it’s collecting may be just as interesting, and the service SocialGreat is one of the first to make use of it.
The idea behind SocialGreat is very simple: To show the most popular places in cities during set periods of time. As the tagline says, “Where’s the crowd?” But here’s why it’s better than a regular rating system: You vote with your feet. As in, if you go to a place, and check-in there, it gets a point on the leader board.
The service launched in New York City a couple weeks ago, and last week it added San Francisco. This allowed it to track the movements of nearly 3,000 people, which provided some interesting data about how groups migrate from place to place. But starting today, it’s now available in all the cities that Foursquare is available in. This will undoubtedly mean a lot more data points, and even more interesting information.
SocialGreat uses Foursquare’s API to pull your information. When you visit the site, you click the “Join” button and you’re taken to a Foursquare page to allow your data to be sent via OAuth. Your data is then entered into the information pool.
SocialGreat’s main page keeps it simple: You can track the hot places based on hour, day, week, or all-time. A list shows you how many people have been to that place, as well as the recent trend of people going or not going there (expressed in positive or negative numbers, respectively). To the right of this list, all of the popular places are shown on a map. From there you can click on any of them to get their address.
One downside is so many people check in at airports. That’s why in the image above you see “San Francisco” leading the pack (it’s really SFO, the airport). The same is true in New York. Still, that should be easy enough to filter out if the service chooses to.
As I said, it’s a simple idea and application, but it’s potentially a very good idea to track trendy places based on a very real metric — people actually going to them. Of course, it will be more useful the more people who sign up and use Foursquare, and in turn allow SocialGreat to access their data.
SocialGreat is the brainchild of Pepper Lillie’s Bill Piel and Googler Jon Steinberg (which is kind of interesting since Foursquare itself is the similar, follow-up service to Dodgeball, which Google bought in 2005, only to let it die). The duo also go the help of Drop.io CEO Sam Lessin.
Update: As Piel notes in the comments, the full range of cities aren’t quite live on the front-end of the site yet (they will be tomorrow), but you can probably figure out the URL for the city you’re looking for pretty easily.
LOVE this site. Big up to these guys.
Love this site? Why? This site is useless at best…”To show the most popular places in cities during set periods of time.” Come on, what is it for after you know which place the most popular is…
Don’t you know it’s for helping terrorists plan attacks on the busiest areas and knowing when they will be the busiest?
Would be nice if Los Angeles was listed as a city next. And finding the exact address for everyplace visited is a bit of a nuisance sometimes. Most places are not listed in the directory. Is there an easier way to this? Instead of listing the 20 things around me for like 2 miles.
Lucky guess of mine:
http://socialgr....com/losangeles
works.
heh, good guess.
Ok, you figured out our “secret” url scheme. We weren’t going to launch all cities til tomorrow, but you can see them if you guess the urls.
heh, i’ll update with that.
MG, sorry to reverse your update, but I just flipped the switch and all cities are now in the drop down. Didn’t want to confuse people. Thanks!
That initial “SAN FRANCISCO” on the SF list is actually “SAN FRANCISCO INTERNATIONAL AIRPORT” truncated. If you click on it, it’ll show you on the map.
yep, dennis crowley of foursquare actually emailed me on that about 2 seconds after the post went up, corrected it – thx! still, it seems like it might be a good idea to filter that out, as airports aren’t really trendy places to go hang out at
But how are they different than Loopt?
Well, these guys started Dodgeball in 2000 (that’s 9 years ago) and realized coaxing people at out of the same personal info was better done through a game, than a pure social network, which is what Dodgeball was. Loopt, on the other hand is in a pool of, now commoditized , startups without defensible technology that claims dominance over data easily provided by the likes of Yahoo FireEagle or Google Latitude. Minimal barrier to entry for Facebook,, ec. I’m certain you can figure out the rest of the story…
Not really useful at all in its current state. Betaworks and R/GA are not exactly cool places to hang out.
Unless foursquare can break out of the tech nerd crowd this will be rather useless.
Personally, I don’t see many people checking in to where they go. But who knows, I could be wrong.
I think what citysense is doing is the more realistic way of getting useful real-time data on city hotspots.
Says you. I’ve always thought LAX was happening Its fab-tastic!
The app is cool and smart. But this seems pretty easy for others to copy / incorporate into larger apps. Are they planning to roll out additional features?
I’m trying to roll a new version out tonight. And we’d be happy to hear feature requests anyone might have – @socialgreat
I think what citysense is doing is the more realistic way of getting useful real-time data on city hotspots.
I’m trying to roll a new version out tonight. And we’d be happy to hear feature requests anyone might have – @socialgreat
this is a great tool for any ages way to go guys!!