Location based social network Foursquare announced this afternoon that it will host its first Hack Day on February 4th in New York City. That means developers will be traveling to a still undisclosed location to work together on interesting new ways to make use of Foursquare, its Place and Check-in data.
I’m cheering for someone to build a Foursquare mashup with Google News and Wikipedia, so I can be told automatically when the places I go have been mentioned in the news or have history posted on Wikipedia. What would you like to see built? What would you like to build, yourself? Af all the competing location services online, Foursquare probably has the best combination of a useful API and lots of rich user and Place data.
We wrote a year ago this month about Foursquare’s news data publishing partners as the dawn of an era of location as platform. A year later, publishing partners have grown more numerous and interesting – but it feels like the progress made has fallen short of my hopes and expectations.
That’s probably more true of Twitter’s location platform than of Foursquare’s though. The location-aware future still looks bright going into 2011 though, and moving hackers to the front is a great way to help it get here faster.
