Those of you who use Foursquare to database your life can have some fun today. Foursquare launched a cool interactive visualization tool called Time Machine yesterday.
Go there, login, and watch Foursquare go back in time and show you all of your movements around your city and the world. For me it was the past four years. Trips I'd almost forgotten came back to life. And at the end, I got this. You can get one too.
A few things about that infographic. The placed I've checked into the most, The Coffee Shop, is a place I will never go to again. Sometime in early 2012, I was treated badly by a hostess, and on the way out I vowed never to return. I haven't and won't.
I've been using Foursquare for about four years and have checked in almost 5,000 times. That's an average of 3.4x a day. No wonder Foursquare is so good at making recommendations for me when I am in places I don't know much about.
While we are on the topic of Foursquare, I want to address some tweets I saw yesterday that mangled some things I said about the company. I spoke at two events yesterday and at both I was asked about Foursquare. I said the same thing at both events, which is that Foursquare has pivoted the product from being primarily about checkins to being primarily about maps with people in them. They've done a fantastic job at that. But the market doesn't know that Foursquare is about maps and map search with people in it. They could do a better job in getting that word out. And I am happy to help them do that.
