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Show HN: Comparing checkin counts from Foursquare and Facebook Places

11 points by alooPotato 16y ago

alooPotato 16y ago
HN - I performed a quick analysis of checkin counts for different kinds of businesses on both Foursquare and Facebook places. Also, looked at sheer number of places in their respective databases. Mostly obvious conclusions, Foursquare has approx 10x the venues and 10x the number of checkins but it does vary quite a bit depending on category of business and which city you look at.
OmarIsmail 16y ago
Very good analysis. This gives a good picture as to where the two services currently stand. Surprisingly Facebook is doing better than I would have predicted. I don't think you'll actually need to do too many more data dumps to see where the trend is. Doing an analysis like this in May would probably be a good indication to see how the respective services are growing. However, it would still be incomplete since the way they may be growing is through expanding to more cities instead of going "deeper" into a particular city. My guess is that the main cities you looked at are already pretty saturated, though maybe they're not, so doing the analysis next month would definitely indicate which way. If it's possible now it would be good to see how many cities in North America have at least 1 venue on FSQR/FB, and how many have 10 venues, etc. And then see how that grows over time. I think that way you could get a clearer picture of overall growth without having to make an insane amount of API requests.
- alooPotato 16y ago
  Yep - planning on doing it one more time in May. Not sure how I could get the number of venues in a particular city WITHOUT doing these crazy number of API requests. The API doesn't have venue counts for a particular geographic region. For example, the Foursquare API only lets you ask for a list of venues near a certain lat/long. It also limits its results to 50 per request. So there is no way to tell how many venues are in a region without splitting up the region and doing multiple requests then aggregating the results.
  - OmarIsmail 16y ago
    When you say "near" can you choose the radius? Also does their API return a value such as "total results"? If the answer to both are yes then you can be quite strategic in how you make your calls and depending on the max distance could cover North America in under 10K calls which would take less than 2 hours to process. It would also make for a pretty bitchin visualization.
    - alooPotato 16y ago
      Unfortunately the answer is no and no. Foursquare returns the closest 50 venues, period. Facebook on the other hand is much better. They let you set a radius and a limit to the number of results you want. The limit can be huge, you just have to page through the results (max 500 per page). If you are interested, checkout apigee.com, they have a cool console that lets you experiment with multiple API's. What did you think of the Google Earth visualizations at the bottom of the blog post?
thinkbohemian 16y ago
When comparing numbers, did you normalize by time? Facebook places has not been around for nearly as long, so even if they have more people who use the service regularly at those venues, it wouldn't show up in the analysis. Even so, i find this work interesting, thanks for the data!
- alooPotato 16y ago
  No problem! There was no normalization by time - that is, this was a snapshot of current data as if April 1, 2011. Unfortunately, there is now way to see for a particular venue, the historical timestamps of every checkin on Facebook. It is possible on the Foursquare API, but not Facebook

11 points by alooPotato 16y ago

HN - I performed a quick analysis of checkin counts for different kinds of businesses on both Foursquare and Facebook places. Also, looked at sheer number of places in their respective databases. Mostly obvious conclusions, Foursquare has approx 10x the venues and 10x the number of checkins but it does vary quite a bit depending on category of business and which city you look at.

OmarIsmail 16y ago

Very good analysis. This gives a good picture as to where the two services currently stand. Surprisingly Facebook is doing better than I would have predicted. I don't think you'll actually need to do too many more data dumps to see where the trend is. Doing an analysis like this in May would probably be a good indication to see how the respective services are growing. However, it would still be incomplete since the way they may be growing is through expanding to more cities instead of going "deeper" into a particular city. My guess is that the main cities you looked at are already pretty saturated, though maybe they're not, so doing the analysis next month would definitely indicate which way. If it's possible now it would be good to see how many cities in North America have at least 1 venue on FSQR/FB, and how many have 10 venues, etc. And then see how that grows over time. I think that way you could get a clearer picture of overall growth without having to make an insane amount of API requests.

alooPotato 16y ago
Yep - planning on doing it one more time in May. Not sure how I could get the number of venues in a particular city WITHOUT doing these crazy number of API requests. The API doesn't have venue counts for a particular geographic region. For example, the Foursquare API only lets you ask for a list of venues near a certain lat/long. It also limits its results to 50 per request. So there is no way to tell how many venues are in a region without splitting up the region and doing multiple requests then aggregating the results.
- OmarIsmail 16y ago
  When you say "near" can you choose the radius? Also does their API return a value such as "total results"? If the answer to both are yes then you can be quite strategic in how you make your calls and depending on the max distance could cover North America in under 10K calls which would take less than 2 hours to process. It would also make for a pretty bitchin visualization.
  - alooPotato 16y ago
    Unfortunately the answer is no and no. Foursquare returns the closest 50 venues, period. Facebook on the other hand is much better. They let you set a radius and a limit to the number of results you want. The limit can be huge, you just have to page through the results (max 500 per page). If you are interested, checkout apigee.com, they have a cool console that lets you experiment with multiple API's. What did you think of the Google Earth visualizations at the bottom of the blog post?

thinkbohemian 16y ago

When comparing numbers, did you normalize by time? Facebook places has not been around for nearly as long, so even if they have more people who use the service regularly at those venues, it wouldn't show up in the analysis. Even so, i find this work interesting, thanks for the data!

alooPotato 16y ago
No problem! There was no normalization by time - that is, this was a snapshot of current data as if April 1, 2011. Unfortunately, there is now way to see for a particular venue, the historical timestamps of every checkin on Facebook. It is possible on the Foursquare API, but not Facebook