An Ode to Foursquare

A few days ago, Josh Williams (co-founder of Gowalla, Foursquare's old competitor) posted something that finally pushed me to do a little tinkering with all this data:

something I always wanted to do with Gowalla, or something peak Foursquare could have done, is a Places Wrapped

This landed for me because I think about this nearly every single week. For a long time now I've been wanting to connect my Swarm data to Claude. I'd been learning about and tinkering more with MCP (Model Context Protocol), which lets AI assistants connect to external data sources, but didn't see one publicly available for Foursquare/Swarm. A few conversations with Claude Code later... I had an MCP server that let me ask questions like how many coffee shops did I visit this year? What was my first check-in? What are 50 fun facts about my location history?

Next step was: could this be a web app?

I should be clear: I am not an engineer and I am not a designer. I've spent 15+ years in marketing, operations, and strategy. What I built in about two hours, in between meetings and partially by dictating to Claude FROM THE BATHTUB, would have taken me weeks/months of friction and frustration a year ago, if I bothered to attempt it at all.

The result is Swarm Wrapped.

Connect your Swarm account and it generates your stats for the year, streaks, top venues, a map of everywhere you've been, your "chronotype," and more. Everything happens in your browser—nothing stored on any servers. When you close your browser, your session is gone.

(You can also select to hide churches, schools, homes, and medical facilities, since those felt like relatively sensitive data—it's in the footer on your report page).

Learning Claude Code the last couple weeks has felt like being given superpowers. This little app is my third project—I also built a Claude 2025 Wrapped report for myself and a 24-hour clock for my son to help visualize his daily routine. These are all just personal tools and little experiments, but now I really get how the barrier between "I have an idea" and "I have a working thing" has dropped dramatically thanks to AI. Tools like this used to require permission, resources, and a lot of time... now they just require curiosity.

Building this meant also analyzing 15+ years of my own data. Some highlights:

• 741,347 miles traveled between check-ins. That's 29.8 times around Earth. Biggest single-day jump: 8,110 miles from Dallas to Hong Kong.
• Check-ins on all 7 continents, including Antarctica. 44 countries. 4 Antarctic check-ins including Port Lockroy and the Lemaire Channel (February 2020). Southernmost point: -65.14° latitude.
• A 314-day consecutive check-in streak. February 18, 2016 to December 27, 2016. Followed immediately by a 310-day streak.
• 3,619 coffee shop visits. 471 at Snowbird Coffee, 475 at various Starbucks. Peak coffee activity: 2016-2017.
• 2017 was my most active year: 11 check-ins per day. 4,006 total. June 2016 was my single most active month with 435.
• 1,343 check-ins at Uber offices. 960 at SF HQ, 537 at Uber DC, plus satellite offices.
• Some of the hardest-to-reach places on Earth: Korean DMZ, Tiger's Nest Monastery in Bhutan, the summit at Machu Picchu, a hot air balloon over Masai Mara, the last Blockbuster (in Bend, OR), and Stephen King's house (just outside, lol).
• 78 different types of restaurants—including some of the world's best: Osteria Francescana (#1 in the world at the time), Central in Lima (#1 in 2023), The French Laundry, Alinea. Plus 734 late-night food runs and a 4:57 AM taco at Taqueria Cancún.
• Geographic phases of life: San Francisco area (11,514), Washington DC (6,370), Austin (4,459), Marfa (1,126).

Bonus stats and notable check-ins: 7,821 unique venues (63.7% visited only once), 127 international airports, the Sistine Chapel, the Colosseum, the Sagrada Família, the Eiffel Tower, Christ the Redeemer, Iguazú Falls, and the Grand Canyon.

Swarm Wrapped is free (obviously). The MCP server is MIT licensed. If you're a Swarm user, please give it a try! And if you have any feedback, concerns, or questions, please hit me up.