If you’re a heavy foursquare user like I am, you know that your check-in data from over the years is pretty interesting to look at. While it’s extremely interesting, you might not have known how useful it could be. Part of the reason for that is because foursquare has focused on creating a killer app that allows you to log all of the places you visit for yourself, and for your friends.

Today, foursquare took a gigantic leap forward by bringing its “Explore” offering to the web. Last November, the company gave its website a huge facelift by making foursquare places look prettier and easier to discover. This release goes way further than that, finally turning all of that check-in data into a real actionable web experience.

By pulling together its 1,500,000,000 check-ins, “tens of millions” of tips, and over half million lists, foursquare has now become more of a complete service. Here’s what the company had to say about Explore for the web:

Finally, because Explore is powered by check-ins and foursquare Tips, it’s not just personalized, it’s specific. Search for ‘pool table,’ or ‘guacamole’; ‘deep dish,’ or ‘thin crust.’ Because not all bars, Mexican restaurants, or pizza joints are created equal, and we want to make sure you find what you’re craving.

As the company has made efforts to make it easier to not only check-in, but share tips and specific information about a location, that data can now be used in any number of ways. We’ve already seen it in action with mashups like FoursCrowd, that predicts how busy a particular spot might be.

When you visit Explore on the web and login to your account, you’re presented with a map and search options. It now becomes a community driven and extremely social version of Google Maps, and also a way better offering than Google Places.

The results themselves display in a way that makes all of the data you and your friends have given over the years seem worthwhile. If you’re looking for pizza in your area, you’ll be shown a map of all of the local places, along with information about them on the left. It’s not just information pulled from businesses or Yelp, it’s information that matters to you. You’re shown which of your friends have checked in, as well as pictures and tips about the venue.

It’s as if this was foursquare’s master plan all along. To provide a rich experience like this, you need massive amounts of data. Phase 1 was the app, which brought the company that data. This phase brings everything together in a way that absolutely blows Google’s properties out of the water. Why? Because when you search for Places on Google, there’s not much information there.

While foursquare has done deals with media properties for promotional purposes and specials with companies like American Express, this is the type of product that is easily monetizable. For example, foursquare could simply sell a premium listing that would show at the top of the results, much like Google does.

By pulling all of our data together and presenting it to us in this useful fashion, foursquare has somehow found a way to make us want to use its service more often. Google on the other hand hasn’t found that “hook” as of yet with its social properties.

➤ foursquare Explore

A few weeks ago, I wrote about an app that showed Wikipedia updates in real-time. The information flew by quickly in a stream, showing exactly how active the site is with updates and edits.

If you weren’t impressed with that, then you should definitely check out WikipediaVision.

The app shows updates close to real-time, but plots them on a Google Map showing how truly global Wikipedia is. One second, there’s an updated in Philadelphia, the next there’s one in Paris. It’s even more mesmerizing than watching a stream of text.

Around the world in 3 Wikipedia edits

This is another one of those fun apps that is great to set up on a second monitor that surely beats a boring screensaver.

WikipediaVision gives you the location of the edit, as well as a link to the actual page. It’s unlikely that you’ll click all of the edits you see, it’s quite interesting to see the difference in the type of pages that get edited in each corner of the globe. After watching the app for five minutes, I saw quite a few Wikipedia updates on television shows in the United States.

While WikipediaVision isn’t fully real-time, it’s pretty close. Get ready to lose at least 15 minutes of your productivity upon first glance. Visualizations like this really put the importance and scale of Wikipedia into context.

➤ WikipediaVision

This is a ridiculously cool and unique usage of Google Maps’ API. Developer Brad Thompson aims to launch a platform where you can not only see what city blocks looked like in the past, but you can view what businesses inhabited the city long before you lived there. That platform is Pastmapper.

Putting old city listings and directories on top of the Google Maps API, Thompson gives an old world a new life, thanks to technology.

Here’s how Thompson explains Pastmapper:

For quick access to realtime information, (photographs, Tweets, business listings, weather, voting results, etc.), online maps are incredibly powerful tools. The more realtime the information is, the more valuable it is, and maps are in a constant state of being updated to keep up with the world. These tools are generally suited for answering a question that begins ‘What is happening?” or “What just happened?”. A few amazing examples of current data on maps are Eric Fischer’s racial distribution maps, the Oakland Crimespotting map by Stamen Design and the New York Times Hurricane Tracker.

But what if your real interest is what happened further back in the past? Online maps today simply add layers of information onto today’s map. Pastmapper is a first step towards answering ‘What was here?’ or ‘Whatever happened to..?’, by delivering a map, not just a data layer, that takes a fourth-dimensional view.

San Francisco in 1853

The first map released on Pastmapper is San Francisco in 1853. You can click around on the markers to get information about the businesses that were there during that time. Everything from bakeries to liquor stores are shown in an extremely condensed portion of San Francisco. If you click the button to see the map in 2011, you’ll see how many streets and detail have been added to the city since the 19th century.

The project is fascinating and hopefully Thompson continues to add more cities, as the power of publicly available information can help recreate experiences long before there was a Google Maps API to build on top of.

➤ Pastmapper

If you’re planning a trip to Las Vegas and want to get a real feel for what it’ll be like once you’re there, Google Maps is bringing more dimensions to its service. Three to be exact. The Google Maps team announced today that its rolling out 3D Maps in select cities all over the globe.

Here’s what the team said about today’s release:

Google Maps continuously works to bring you real-life 3D representations of your favorite cities from around the world. Google Maps in 3D combines a functional map with stunning visuals. You can tour an increasing number of cities in 3D and experience the streets and sights right from your computer or Android device.

Since embarking on our 3D mapping efforts, we have amassed a collection of cities that allows you to feel like a jet-setter. We have recently expanded and improved this collection to include more cities in Japan, Europe and the US, to name a few. You can experience a few cities below.

Check out Las Vegas and Rome:

These are the other cities that are available for a 3D tour on Google Maps:

US: Foster City, Honolulu, Las Vegas, Norfolk,Palo Alto, Portland, Redwood City, Riverside, Salt Lake City, San Antonio, San Diego, Santa Cruz, Sunnyvale.
Europe: Rome, IT, Rotterdam, NL; Seville, ES; Stuttgart, DE, Amsterdam, NL

Along with street view, the amount of detail you can now get from viewing Google Maps is astounding, and the team keeps adding more things to make checking out a map an experience that you can almost touch.

The best advertisements are the ones that are so cool you don’t even care if you’re being advertised to. This Peugeot RCZ promotion is one that does a brilliant job of showcasing a new vehicle on the market as well as giving us something cool to play with.

On top of what appears to be a pretty nifty car, the site RCZView lets you put a start point and an end point on a map, and the site uses Google Street View images to stitch together a stop motion animation of the route.

Creating your own is simple, just put in the addresses and give the site a minute or two to create your route.

Once you’ve entered the coordinates, you can watch the animation which shows up as a full-screen animation that is stitched together so well it looks like a video. It’s a fantastic usage of the Google Maps API.

Check out this video demonstration:

You’re given a URL to share the route with your friends, which of course serves as more advertisement for the Peugeot RCZ, but it’s so cool you won’t even care about that.

If all of that wasn’t cool enough, the site retains all of the routes entered and allows you to browse through them and watch each animation. It’s a time-waster, sure, but it’s quite fascinating to see different neighborhoods in the world as if you were driving through them yourself.

Companies, agencies, and marketers take note, this promo is so sweet and so well done, the fact that it’s an advertisement doesn’t even matter. And for that reason, this baby can go crazy viral.

➤ RCZView

If you’re a Nirvana fan, you’ve probably spent hours upon hours scouring the Internet looking for every piece of footage available on the band. The site A World Of Nirvana has taken the grunt work out of enjoying rare concert footage of the band from the entire life of their career together.

The app uses the Google Maps and YouTube APIs to collect concert footage broken up by each year and pulled and shown on the location the event happened.

Simply choose your year of interest, pick a location, and the video is shown directly from YouTube. Some of the videos are super compressed full versions. The quality of the videos aren’t the best, but there are shows that I’ve found here that I didn’t know existed on YouTube.

Even if you’re not a huge Nirvana fan, you’ll find surfing around the map and picking a random show to check out to be fun. Hearing the band’s sound get tighter over the years is impressive for any fan of music to watch.

➤A World Of Nirvana

According to its creator Tom Jenkins, here’s the story of the bored toy seeking adventure:

A lonely desk toy longs for escape from the dark confines of the office, so he takes a cross-country road trip to the Pacific Coast in the only way he can – using a toy car and Google Maps Street View.

Enjoy this extremely beautiful video with amazing music, reminiscent of the whimsical fun we’ve seen in the Toy Story movies:

If you’ve used services like foursquare that let you check-in to a location or leave tips, then you’re familiar with the concept of leaving your digital mark on top of a geographic location.

The service SkyChalk doesn’t want you to check-in though, it just wants to know what you have to say about a certain area, no matter where you are.

With a great spin on the Google Maps API, SkyChalk lets you annotate any location on a map, even if it’s not a location to check-in at, such as a restaurant.

For example, you could use SkyChalk to write a note about that chance encounter you had with someone, hoping they’d one day find the service and read it.

Chalking the globe

The different types of use cases for SkyChalk are limitless. When you sign up for the service, the app picks your current location and shows you all of the notes people have written about different areas around you. People can submit notes with their names, or anonymously if they choose.

With no need to download an app or check-in anywhere, you are free to surf around Google Maps for locations that bring back memories to you. The service is also extremely useful for policing a community, as you can point out tricky sidewalks or faulty traffic lights.

All of your notes are tracked with your profile, so if you post them with your username, other users can check out all of the places you’ve annotated. It’s quite an interesting geographic based social network, with no bounds or rating systems for locales. You can however, vote up someone’s note as a sign of appreciation or usefulness.

One thing I’d like to see is the ability to make notes private, as this would be a great annotation tool for travel, without all of the social aspects.

If you travel a lot, or really care about the location around you, then you might want to give SkyChalk a try. I’ve found a lot of silly comments about how rude a waitress is, or how certain blocks in San Francisco are full of girls who aren’t single, so whether you’ll find it useful or not is up to you.

➤ SkyChalk

We’ve written about some of the cool things that you can do with the foursquare API. We’ve seen visualizations of check-ins, and tools to help you find places around highway exits. But what if you just want to see all of the check-ins going on around you in real-time?

4SQoogle mashes up the foursquare API with Google Maps to show you any locations venues and live check-ins in real-time. The site doesn’t drill into who actually checked in, but it’s a nice way to see what venues are the most popular around you at any given time.

While the site is merely a mashup and not a product, it would be nice to get a bit more information about venues, or at least a direct link to the venue page on foursquare. I found it difficult to use the service to find somewhere new to eat, for example.

Train stations are hot right now

When I put my general location into 4SQoogle, I noticed that little icons would jump up and down when there was check-in activity. It seems like the service shows check-ins in something close to real-time, because I tested it by checking into my apartment complex.

As I watched the map, I saw a few check-ins at the local train station here in San Francisco. It would be interesting to leave 4SQoogle up on an extra monitor all day to see if you can pick up any check-in trends based on the time of day.

While the site could add some more features as I mentioned, it’s a real interesting visualization of the usage on foursquare. The foursquare service has definitely gone mainstream coast to coast in the U.S., as I continually hear people ask each other “did you check-in?” at restaurants in cities like NYC, Philly, and San Francisco.

4SQoogle shows you “what’s hot” based on the number of “live check-ins”, which means the number of total check-ins since you opened the site. You can also search the site as you would on Google Maps for specific address and locations.

It’s a great way to see what’s going on around you, and perhaps you’ll find a new favorite bar or even a train station that has lots of people visiting it.

➤ 4SQoogle

One of my favorite things to do online is chat. Real-time chats haven’t been done well since the old aol chatroom days where you could enter a room based on the city you were close to, or an interest that you had.

Since aol, apps like Yobongo have tried to bring chat back with real-time serendipitous chats based on your location.

Today a simple app called “Sirkel” was released.

Set your chat Sirkel

By dragging the slider up and down on the right hand side of Sirkel, you can choose how much of the world you’d like to chat with. Your default circle is set to 3 miles.

You log in with your Facebook account, and the app asks you for your location. Once you get going, it’s kind of neat to see new people pop up on the map.

Chatting through your browser

Since Sirkel kept things simple, there is nothing to download. By clicking the photo above the red dot when someone pops up on the map, a chat is started with them. The chat interface is clean, and lays nicely on top of the map.

I could see leaving Sirkel up on my extra monitor, glancing at it once in a while to see if anyone is active. What we miss on Twitter and Facebook is real-time interactions with people that we don’t know. While this might not be something for everyone, it is a nice way to chat outside of your normal circle.

Considering that you can drag around the map, it will be interesting to see which areas embrace Sirkle, if any. The only downside to Sirkel is that there is no “friends list”, so if I chat with someone I have to remember their name, otherwise it’s likely that we’ll never talk again.

Try chatting outside of your default 3 miles, and see who you meet! Since the app requires you to login with Facebook, Sirkel won’t end up being rowdy or crude, since peoples real names are coming along with the incoming chat requests.