Is it possible to crawl check-in data from foursquare in a greedy way? (even if I don't have friendship with all the users) Just like crawling publicly available twitter messages. If you have any experience or suggestions, please share. Thanks.
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Because I want to analyze user spacial temporal mobility using check-in data – Yibin Nov 24 '11 at 17:45
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If you have publicly available tweets containing links to foursquare, you can resolve the foursquare short links (4sq.com/XXXXXX) by making a HEAD request. The head request will return a URL with a check-in ID and a signature. You can use those two values to retrieve a check-in object via the foursquare API /checkins/ endpoint. You're only allowed to access 500 of these per hour.
You must abide by both the Twitter and foursquare terms of service -- in fourquare's case, you may not display this information to anyone, nor may you retain any user information for more than 3 hours (since the user has not authorized your application).
akdotcom
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This may seem obvious, but you can use the same HEAD request to dereference a t.co URL as well. – Craig Wright Jan 30 '13 at 03:26
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You can only get the check-in data for a location if the manager of the location gives you OAuth access to your application. If you have that, you can use the real-time API defined here: https://developer.foursquare.com/docs/realtime.html
adamweeks
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No, it is not possible to crawl check-in data similar to Twitter. This information is considered personal data and is not public.
Jeff Wilcox
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