Foursquare taps Gnip to let academics and journalists use its worldwide realtime check-in data for research
Foursquare and Gnip on Thursday together announced a partnership that will see the former’s check-in data distributed to the latter’s clients. Foursquare is giving Gnip a realtime feed of the places where its users are checking in, which is naturally anonymized for privacy purposes.
So what data exactly will Foursquare give to Gnip? Three separate pieces:
- Each check-in’s location (for instance, Stop & Shop).
- The time and date of the check-in (April 30, 2013 at 11:03pm GMT) .
- The gender of the person checking in (male).
Again, the check-ins are not tied to individual users. The technical-looking output looks like this:
Foursquare says it regularly gets requests from people who want to use its data for research. The company has worked with select academic institutions and press outlets on data research projects in the past, which it says have “shed new insight and to effect positive change in how the real world works.”
The Gnip partnership goes further. For those who don’t kow, Gnip is an aggregation company that provides data from dozens of social media websites via one API.
Foursquare will be joining Gnip’s growing list of premium publishers, including Twitter, Tumblr, WordPress, Disqus, IntenseDebate, StockTwits, and Estimize. Gnip says it is offering both the full firehose and filtered access of Foursquare’s data.
More to follow.
