If you thought your Foursquare and Facebook Places check-ins were hit-and-run affairs, Gogobot has figured out a way to give them more permanence and utility as a sharing and travel-planning tool.
Gogobot, the social travel-planning site, has integrated Foursquare and Facebook Places check-ins -- a move that could dramatically upsize the site's content.
When you give Gogobot permission to access your check-ins from the two largest location-based services, the check-ins -- whether it is the restaurant you checked into 18 months ago or the hotel you checked into last night -- appear in your Gogobot passport, enabling you to share the experience with your friends.
"Check-ins mostly have been a quick and fleeting experience," says Travis Katz, Gogobot co-founder and CEO. "We're giving meaning and context to this whole game of checking in."
The integration dramatically increases the places you've visited in your Gogobot passport, and you can add photos and reviews to round them out. You also can delete any that you wish.
Instead of actively deciding to add places you've traveled to your Gogobot account, you can sit back and passively watch them accumulate as you go about checking-in on Foursquare and Facebook Places.
For Gogobot, which has seen users share more than 350,000 places since it launched three months ago, the check-in integrations thus may dramatically increase the sharing because it accesses your recent and historical check-ins.
Katz says the integration will enable Gogobot and your friends to make better travel recommendations.
Interestingly, Katz says the heavy lifting in the integration wasn't connecting to the Foursquare and Facebook APIs, but it was in building a sophisticated algorithm to match the various names a venue might go by with the address and to weed out check-ins -- from conferences and workplaces, for instance -- that aren't travel-related.
"It was a huge data challenge," Katz concedes.
To get your check-in streaming in, go to your Gogobot account settings and select linked accounts. From there you can choose to give Gogobot access to your Foursquare and Facebook check-ins. If you had already signed into Gogobot using Facebook Connect, you were already asked to grant permission for access to your check-ins.