Autobiopic takes your Foursquare checkins (only your most recent 250... hopefully Foursquare will increase that limit) and generates a movie about where you've been (yes, perhaps, more slideshow than movie, but "autoslideshow" doesn't sound as good as "autobiopic"). You can also pause the movie and use the slider to move to any of your checkins and resume the movie from there. At each checkin Autobiopic will also display relevant information -- venue, city, date, time, etc. -- on the right sidebar (see photo below). Time of day is also reflected in the Google maps color scheme.

As the name indicates, I wanted this app to serve as a bit of a documentary for each user's life as captured by their checkin history and enable a user to sit back and watch their travels. Not to suggest life can be reduced to a series of checkins described by an icon, date, latitude, and longitude... and sometimes a shout--that would be sad--but I hope Autobiopic offers some enjoyment for users. Please e-mail me with any comments, bugs, and suggestions.

I've recently extended the Autobiopic app to crunch some numbers on where people travel--that is, how often does City B appear on the same users' check-in history as City B in the visualization CityLinks. Hopefully after enough visitors check out Autobiopic, CityLinks will have a nice dataset to work from.

Autobiopic and CityLinks were made by Tom Brennan but would not be possible without Foursquare, the Google Maps API, and the very handy Foursquare-sync library (of which this site offers a nice tutorial). CityLinks is powered by the excellent GeoNames database.

Use Autobiopic || Use CityLinks