Foursquare Day

For those of you who may not know (or care), April 16 is Foursquare Day; largely an event promoted by mobile for Foursquare users to meet and mingle at various places. But, this post isn't about that. It's about their visualization tool that shows what you've done for a year. There are just four preset visualizations and they aren't all that helpful for anyone, including the user. If only I could download this or geographically see where I've been, or what cities I've been to have the highest concentration of unlocked badges. The Foursquare network is still growing and provides an alternate means of tracking hyperlocal ad redemption.

A Foursquare Visualization.
Pretty cool looking, utterly useless

Another Foursquare Visualization.
This one shows quantity by venue type,
with no indication if you've visited a place more than once.

Real-time Crowd-sourced Incident Dashboard

Because the stakes are high (loss of life, financial disruption, loss of property), many countries, cities, and private citizens have devoted time and resources into developing this global network of seismic tracking and archiving.

It would be great if an easy-to-use interactive dashboard for businesses tracked activities such as real-time sales pipeline flow, new product activation or purchases, campaign effectiveness, budget vs actual spends, etc. The visualization below is from the USGS and it tracks all earthquakes that happen around the world. It can be filtered to show either all magnitudes or 2.5 M and above, and within the last 7 or 30 days. And, this map display has evolved over the past several years to what it is today. There is a beta mobile version of it, though it doesn't seem to spew out useful data to a casual observer. 

USGS: real-time display of 2.5M earthquakes

While there aren't major fault lines running through the Pacific northwest like in California, this regional display (click to view) shows where earthquakes have occurred in the last two weeks.

Interested in other data projects from the USGS? Here are a few more links that show how the earthquake data is crowd-sourced:

• Did you feel it?
• International Registry of Seismograph Stations
• Netquakes: Volunteer Monitoring for urban areas