

Show HN: My Weekend Project: find popular spots nearby using Facebook Graph API - sjm
http://findplac.es

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sjm
I built this over the weekend as a way of learning Python and web.py, and
having a play with Bootstrap (I'm absolutely no designer).

The idea is to use Facebook check-ins as a metric of popularity for any kind
of place you're looking for — bars, restaurants, parks, coffee shops —
anywhere people have checked into.

Unfortunately for a lot of popular places, their Facebook pages are un-managed
so a lot of descriptions are unavailable. I'm not really sure if there's a use
for this, but it was a fun way to try Python, and I have to say I'm really
impressed with how quick it was to get something up and running with web.py.

I think I'll continue to work on it a bit more as each place found could be
queried further individually to get more information, and it could use some
form of pagination. At the moment the results page is produced from a single
API call, and limited to around the 25 most popular spots found. I had
considered allowing the user to input the search radius (by default, 10km),
but decided on simplicity over customisability in the end.

