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I need my app to display a list of places my friend recently checked in. To do that I used "checkins" endpoint - https://api.foursquare.com/v2/users/USER_ID/checkins. But unfortunately it does not work as expected. It returns recent checkins only of currently logged in user "self". I managed to get one latest checkin of selected friend only. Well "one" checkin only does not help much but brings even more confusion. People think my app is not functioning correctly and complain! :(

It is clearly stated in documentation that only "self" is supported at the moment. I wonder how soon will foursquare allow us developers to read at least 5 or 10 recent checkins or is there any other way to read more than one checkin of selected friend?

I do not want users of my app to think it is not functioning correctly and uninstall it :(.

Kendall Frey
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InterestedDev
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2 Answers2

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For a list of the most recent check-in for friends, use the /checkins/recent endpoint. Eventually the friend tab API will contain more check-ins from active friends, but that API endpoint is under heavy construction right now and we're not yet ready to share it with external developers.

If recency is not as urgent, use the /venues/explore endpoint. It's not documented yet, but you can specify "friendVisits=visited" and get back only venues that a user's friends have been to.

Alex Bitek
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akdotcom
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I don't know what you really want to do with those checkins, so this is just out of the box ideas :)

  • Use the activity (news) feed of the user. This api is not documented. The feed is "hardcoded" in the main html for the web version. Maybe you should look at the mobile version. Anyway, if it's not documented they may not allow to access this data ...

  • Grab the badges list of the user's friends. They contain one venue per unlocked badge.

  • Explore the tips / todo list (done) / lists the user created / mayorships

  • If the "friend" is a user of your application, propose more checkins (I don't know if it's ok with Foursquare. In this case you should notify your users that their checkins may be displayed to their friends). Foursquare has also a retention policy : https://developer.foursquare.com/overview/community

Foursquare doesn't have powerful privacy settings like Facebook. Until then I guess they'll keep friends' check-ins private ... Hope that helps

Emmanuel Tabard
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  • Emmanuel, thank you very much for your response. I would prefer to stick to existing API calls. I think screen scrapping or html parsing and collecting friend's checking is also not reliable solution. I was hoping there is an endpoint I am missing or combination of calls I can do to get desired result. Thank you very much anyways! – InterestedDev Jun 15 '12 at 22:05