What my overall aim is to have check-ins from a group of friends be displayed (most recent first) on a private web-app I am building.
Is this possible? And if so, could someone kindly lead me in the right direction.
Thank you in advance :)
As long as they oAuth your application, you should be able to do this. You can't do this unless they explicitly allow you to for obvious security reasons. If you want a way around that, you can web scrape, but that is another issue entirely.
Take a look at their Real-Time API: https://developer.foursquare.com/overview/realtime
Create an application, then utilize their User Push API - every time one of them checks in, it should push something like this to your server:
{
"id": "4e6fe1404b90c00032eeac34",
"createdAt": 1315955008,
"type": "checkin",
"timeZone": "America/New_York",
"user": {
"id": "1",
"firstName": "Jimmy",
"lastName": "Foursquare",
"photo": "https://foursquare.com/img/blank_boy.png",
"gender": "male",
"homeCity": "New York, NY",
"relationship": "self"
},
"venue": {
"id": "4ab7e57cf964a5205f7b20e3",
"name": "foursquare HQ",
"contact": {
"twitter": "foursquare"
},
"location": {
"address": "East Village",
"lat": 40.72809214560253,
"lng": -73.99112284183502,
"city": "New York",
"state": "NY",
"postalCode": "10003",
"country": "USA"
},
"categories": [
{
"id": "4bf58dd8d48988d125941735",
"name": "Tech Startup",
"pluralName": "Tech Startups",
"shortName": "Tech Startup",
"icon": "https://foursquare.com/img/categories/building/default.png",
"parents": [
"Professional & Other Places",
"Offices"
],
"primary": true
}
],
"verified": true,
"stats": {
"checkinsCount": 7313,
"usersCount": 565,
"tipCount": 128
},
"url": "http://foursquare.com"
}
}
Best of luck to you!