

Show HN: Comparing checkin counts from Foursquare and Facebook Places - alooPotato
http://www.aleemmawani.com/2011/04/facebook-places-vs-foursquare-checkins.html

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OmarIsmail
Very good analysis. This gives a good picture as to where the two services
currently stand. Surprisingly Facebook is doing better than I would have
predicted. I don't think you'll actually need to do too many more data dumps
to see where the trend is. Doing an analysis like this in May would probably
be a good indication to see how the respective services are growing.

However, it would still be incomplete since the way they may be growing is
through expanding to more cities instead of going "deeper" into a particular
city. My guess is that the main cities you looked at are already pretty
saturated, though maybe they're not, so doing the analysis next month would
definitely indicate which way.

If it's possible now it would be good to see how many cities in North America
have at least 1 venue on FSQR/FB, and how many have 10 venues, etc. And then
see how that grows over time. I think that way you could get a clearer picture
of overall growth without having to make an insane amount of API requests.

~~~
alooPotato
Yep - planning on doing it one more time in May.

Not sure how I could get the number of venues in a particular city WITHOUT
doing these crazy number of API requests. The API doesn't have venue counts
for a particular geographic region. For example, the Foursquare API only lets
you ask for a list of venues near a certain lat/long. It also limits its
results to 50 per request. So there is no way to tell how many venues are in a
region without splitting up the region and doing multiple requests then
aggregating the results.

~~~
OmarIsmail
When you say "near" can you choose the radius? Also does their API return a
value such as "total results"?

If the answer to both are yes then you can be quite strategic in how you make
your calls and depending on the max distance could cover North America in
under 10K calls which would take less than 2 hours to process.

It would also make for a pretty bitchin visualization.

~~~
alooPotato
Unfortunately the answer is no and no. Foursquare returns the closest 50
venues, period.

Facebook on the other hand is much better. They let you set a radius and a
limit to the number of results you want. The limit can be huge, you just have
to page through the results (max 500 per page).

If you are interested, checkout apigee.com, they have a cool console that lets
you experiment with multiple API's.

What did you think of the Google Earth visualizations at the bottom of the
blog post?

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alooPotato
HN - I performed a quick analysis of checkin counts for different kinds of
businesses on both Foursquare and Facebook places. Also, looked at sheer
number of places in their respective databases. Mostly obvious conclusions,
Foursquare has approx 10x the venues and 10x the number of checkins but it
does vary quite a bit depending on category of business and which city you
look at.

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thinkbohemian
When comparing numbers, did you normalize by time? Facebook places has not
been around for nearly as long, so even if they have more people who use the
service regularly at those venues, it wouldn't show up in the analysis.

Even so, i find this work interesting, thanks for the data!

~~~
alooPotato
No problem! There was no normalization by time - that is, this was a snapshot
of current data as if April 1, 2011. Unfortunately, there is now way to see
for a particular venue, the historical timestamps of every checkin on
Facebook. It is possible on the Foursquare API, but not Facebook

