API fun

Fun times playing around with the Twitter and Foursquare APIs. I've been brushing up on my javascript skills and putting my home server back into action in order to cook up 'proof of concepts' on a couple areas I'm exploring. I'm not one to start from scratch so I always look for samples first before I start.

On the Foursquare front, someone cooked up this nice little site (Checkin Mania) that I've dug into for sample javascript & 4SQ API code. The site is a really slick mashup of Google Maps and Foursquare/Gowalla data. You can see popular checkin venues on the map and view how many people checked into each venue and other basic information. I think if you want more detailed information you need to use OAuth data to log in, but that's not incorporated into the site just yet. Still, I have to tip my hat to Rakshith and Init Labs, they've put together a pretty robust site with limited resources here. The site was "written using notepad :), hosted on Google App Engine". Nice!

There's no shortage of Twitter API samples on the web so I'm up and running on this platform already. Here I'm digging into the issues of content curation and social discovery. How do I keep up with all the tweets of the people I'm following? Better yet, how do I keep up with all the 'good' tweets of the people I'm following, and let the noise fall by the wayside. Also, how do I find new people to follow? Based on my interests and the data that I've made publicly available, is there a way to find people who share my same interests and can add their 'good' tweets to my Twitter feed?