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Foursquare Opens Up Its Firehose A Bit. Social Great Takes A Drink.

14 Mar 2010

There’s been a lot of hoopla over the past couple of years about Twitter’s so-called “firehose.” Essentially, it’s an open stream of all their data that is provided to developers to use for third-party apps. Foursquare has a firehose of its own, but access to it has been on lock down. Today, for SXSW, Foursquare opened up its firehose a bit more.

Social Great, a service which tracks trending places in cities back on location data, has just gotten access to this firehose of data. This allows them to show in realtime the trending places throughout Austin, Texas, where SXSW is taking place. The service also pulls in data from Gowalla, Brightkite, and GraffitiGeo (Loopt).

As Polaris Ventures EIR Jon Steinberg notes (who helped build Social Great), “the numbers look crazy.” What he means is the check-in data at SXSW. Judging from what I’m seeing on the ground here in Austin, that may be an understatement. Venues routinely have dozens if not hundreds of other Foursquare users at them when they’re trending.

SimpleGeo, one company that has had early access to Foursquare’s firehose, built Vicarious.ly to visualize real-time check-ins around Austin. That data looks fairly insane as well. Most of the check-ins appear to be coming from Foursquare (which saw over 300,000 check-ins on Thursday alone) and Gowalla, but co-founder Joe Stump notes that the battle is too close to call still.

One other note: all these check-ins are made possible by the fact that AT&T’s network has been up and working the whole time. It’s been impressive. Crisis averted, so far.

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Tags: firehose, hoopla, Joe Stump, location data, party apps, steinberg, time check, understatement, whole time

eBeam Whiteboard Delivers Notes to Kindle, for the Kid Who Forgot His Glasses [Kindle]

In: gadgets

8 Dec 2009

In elementary school, I was that kid who always had to sit up front when I forgot my glasses. Think of all the time I could have spent goofing off! If only I had those notes delivered to my Kindle…

Luidia’s eBeam whiteboard has been around for a while, the one that takes a snapshot of the notes on the board and saves them as an image. Now those images can be transmitted directly to a Kindle.

At first I thought this was a pairing of two cool but inessential technologies resulting in something that’s, well, cool but inessential. But now I think it’s kind of neat. In the future, instead of actually watching someone give a presentation, the audience will be staring at their Kindles and tablets the whole time.

Imagine the consequences. Teachers, bosses, parole officers, no one would never be able to tell if you were paying attention to the notes or goofing off on the internet. Not by reading Gizmodo, of course. We would never condone such behavior. [Press Release via Ubergizmo]