One of the great things about working at foursquare is having access to a huge dataset that — when viewed in aggregate — can reveal some really amazing patterns in how people use the product across the globe. To celebrate our one-billionth check-in, we wanted to create something that showed the scope and breadth of that data. In past dataviz projects, we’ve looked at the total history of foursquare and analyzed specific aspects of the check-in data. For this project, we decided to limit it to one typical week of foursquare usage and keep the visualization simple, to give people a chance to draw their own observations. What we decided on was a straightforward map, with time-lapsed checkins animating across it. We chose to color-code the venue categories to reveal a bit about the specific activity going on in different places throughout the day. Here are some of the tools used to create this visualization:

Read More…