Explore Foursquare with Infochimps

Today, Foursquare announced the launch of a web version of Explore, their tool for discovering interesting places.  Leveraging the power of 1.5 billion checkins, this recommendation engine does not spit out one -size-fits-all answers.  Instead, it intelligently compares your own check-in history with those of your friends and others to help you answer questions like…

• What’s the best sushi restaurant in my town that I haven’t been to before?
• What food trailer on East 6th Street will offer me the fastest service at 1am when I have had too much to drink and need a delicious mobile food option NOW?
• Where can I get Golden Monkey beer near the Infochimps HQ during happy hour?

Foursquare Explore is a great illustration of a favorite saying of our CTO, Flip Kromer – “the solution to the too much data problem is more data!”  With the massive amount of check-in data and comments/tips left by Foursquare users, we can suddenly begin to get reliable answers to our strangely difficult to answer everyday questions.

Interested in building a tool similar to Foursquare Explore or augmenting an existing places recommendation engine?  You too can unlock the power of Big Data with some of these great Infochimps APIs:

• Foursquare Places (the Foursquare check-in firehose)
• Bundle.com APIs (aggregated, anonymized credit card transaction data for places – currently, only NYC and SF, but soon with nationwide content)
• Twitter TrstRank and Influence Metrics (dozens of metrics for understanding Twitter users)
• Wikipedia Articles