Avoid the Crowds With Clever New Foursquare API Application

While social media is largely used for its ability to connect people, it also has potential to help antisocial types — as proven by a clever site that tells people when museums, libraries and theaters are least busy.

The site, When Should I Visit?, uses Foursquare’s API to map traffic on each day of the week for about 20 venues in London. People who want to avoid crowds can use the site to make decisions about when to visit.

Since Foursquare doesn’t make any historical data available, site creator Dan W. Williams wrote a program that calls its API ever 15 minutes to make a database. The concept is pretty simple: Since Foursquare tells you where people are, it can also tell you where they aren’t.

Other sites for San Francisco and New York are supposed to launch in about a month, but Williams has no plans to expand beyond that or to try making the sites profitable.

“It’s more of a personal project to see if it’s possible,” he says.

Williams set up the London site at Culture Hack Day — a weekend hacking event for which cultural organizations contribute their data — after someone on Twitter asked a local museum what day it would be least busy.

“It’s sort of this class of act that has become popular lately that gives you this really mundane superpower,” Williams says. “Like there are apps that tell you where to sit on the London underground so that you can get off faster, which doors are nearest the exits on the platforms. This is kind of the same. You can go to a gallery when it is slightly quieter. It’s nothing amazing, but it makes city life slightly more pleasant.”