In this post we’re going to be leveraging Foursquare’s API to get venues near a given geo location and to connect to a user’s Foursquare account, so that we can pull in their realtime check-in feed.

This has been implemented on our live environment, so for a real live demo go to http://niteviva.com and sign in using your Foursquare account. Note that, for account verification and security reasons, you will be asked for your email address when you sign up. You will then be taken to the home page where your Foursquare check-in feed will be displayed on the top right-hand corner.

Foursquare’s API has various client libraries that we can use to start developing with the API. Here, foursquared has been chosen because Java is what we find easy to work with when using third-party APIs. You will need to be comfortable working with Java and Maven to complete the following steps, but even if Java isn’t your cup of tea, this post is still useful to those of you who are generally interested in getting started with Foursquare’s API. Case in point, some of what’s said in this post is based on a great blog post by Joe Siewert, which shows how to get started with Foursquare and PHP. (more…)