Developer preview! Build your app directly into foursquare with our new Connected Apps platform

Over 25,000 developers use the foursquare API to build apps based around people’s experiences in the real world. Until today, though, those apps, whether they help keep people healthy, plan trips, or even give dogs a treat, have been stand-alone. Today, we’re announcing the developer preview of the next evolution: Connected Apps – developer-crafted experiences that exist within foursquare.

This opens up a ton of possibilities, all around interacting with people’s experiences while they’re having them. For instance, Eat This, Not That can suggest healthy dishes the moment someone checks in at a restaurant. Or The Weather Channel can tell people the forecast when they check in to a new city. Whatever you build, anyone in foursquare’s 20,000,000-strong community can connect it to their account and see your messages in their post-check-in screens. We’ll attribute all your app’s contributions, so other people can connect your app or click through to your site.

Developers, you can start testing this out today with the new developer preview endpoints in our API (the documentation is here). It’s a developer preview because we want to see what you do, what our users are looking for, and where we should take the platform.

In working towards this preview, we partnered some companies to help bang on the endpoints and build apps that flex the power and potential of the apps platform. Some of them (Foodspotting, Sonar) are enhancing existing integrations, some of them (Eat This, Not That, The Weather Channel) are new to the foursquare platform and are experimenting around how to better engage their users.

Our preview partners below can be found in the app gallery, which we’ll update again with our full launch:

• Eat This, Not That – From Men’s Health Mag, Eat This, Not That tells you what dishes to order and what to avoid at restaurants when you check in
• Untappd - Shows recommendations from friends and others on which beer to order, and easily check-in to beers from within foursquare
• Sonar – Informs you of your connections to interesting people nearby
• Soundtracking – Share and discover songs your friends have shared at a place
• Snoball – Trigger charity donations when you check in, and tells you about friends’ donations
• Foodspotting – Share and get recommendations on which dishes to order
• GroupMe - Makes it easier to share your check-in with a group of friends on GroupMe
• Blue Legends - Notifies you when you earn extra rewards for checking into Lufthansa venues
• Instagram – Share your Instagram photos on foursquare, which friends can see and tap through to the Instagram app
• Path – Share photos and text from Path, which tap through to the Path app
• The Weather Channel – Get the weather forecast with your first check-in of the day and when you check in to a new city

You can read all the details over at our developer blog and overview. We’re rolling this out to iPhone and Android today, and BlackBerry soon to follow. We’re still in the testing and development phase, so please send feedback here, sign up for the foursquare-api mailing list for updates, and stay tuned for a larger launch later this year!