What is Mayorama? Mayorama is a foursquare application (currently only) for the iPhone designed to provide you, the user, with more detailed information about the rough-and-tumble world of mayorship seeking. You can use Mayorama to find nearby venues that are ripe for conquering, keep track of your current mayorships, and see your progress towards being crowned each time you check-in. It also does some other useful things like show the foursquare places around you on a map (instead of just a list) and sort those places by venue type (food, nightlife, shopping, etc.).
How does Mayorama work? When you log into foursquare with Mayorama, the application goes through your history and totals up your visits to different venues. When you take a look at nearby venues (“targets”, as we like to call them), the application pings a Mayorama server which gets the mayorship details about each one and includes it in the big list it returns to your phone. Between those two things, Mayorama can make you a list of nearby venues that includes how many visits it would take for you to become mayor of each one (the mayor’s visits - your total visits + 2).
Does Mayorama spy on me when I use it? No, the server (currently) doesn’t even really remember who you are and all your information is kept on your phone. In the future there are plans for maybe a web interface, maybe something like a watch list of venues you want to keep an eye one, and other stuff that would require spying (account creation).
Why is Mayorama wrong about numbers sometimes? Math is hard? Also, it’s not entirely clear how foursquare goes about determining which check-ins count towards crowns. Mayorama assumes that the standard is check-ins in the last two months on different calendar days and it’s usually pretty close to being correct, but not all the time. That might be because of time zones, or because there is another rule that discounts a 12:01 AM check-in right after a 11:59 PM one, or because it works a completely different way…who can know these things?
What about sending updates to Twitter and finding nearby tips and seeing where my friends are and all these such things? All in due time. Mayorama is a functional client application for finding places to check-in to and doing so. That’s enough to enable it to serve its purpose for now. Someday it might make sense to build in all the other neat things foursquare can do (and maybe some more that it can’t…), but for now you can just use foursquare’s own app for all that other stuff.
Why is Mayorama imperfect? This is currently Mayorama version “0.9” (or so). It will get better if it looks like people are using it and mature into a more 1.0 type thing. If you’re really frustrated about something, send the Mayorama team an email with helpful feedback.
