It’s with a ton of excitement that I can announce the launch of SocialGreat.com, a site that aggregates and ranks the most popular locations in New York City on the basis of user expressed foot traffic.  This app is the work of Bill Piel and myself, with some help from Sam Lessin who whipped up the early prototype and did a dry run during internet week new york.

Check out the article in Alley Insider.

SocialGreat uses the FourSquare API to pull “check in” data in real time, to determine the greatest social spots on a ranked hourly, daily, and weekly basis in real time.  We show the top checkin spots ranked and their +/- over the previous period. We tell you “Where the Crowd is At” and where it’s moving.

(If you’ve been living under a rock, Four Square is an iPhone app people use to “check in” at restaurants and bars – it’s catching on like sliced bread.)  Kudos to Naveen and Dennis for making a great, open API.

But to harvest this great data, we need you to head over to Socialgreat.com and click “join.”  This will give us oauth permission to gather your checkins and those of your friends on an anonymized basis.  So be counted!  Location-based GPS data is powerful on an individual level and even more powerful when aggregated and tracked as a sample set.

FourSquare is doing something incredibly interesting by allowing on-the-scene users of local establishments and businesses to interact with them in real time both in person and online.  The actions these users take are distinctly active and easy when they choose to “check in” or add a tip at a local restaurant or bar.  It brings the local information online in an easy and natural way.  There’s the seed of something very powerful here and exposing that information in crowd wisdom form is what we are trying to achieve with SocialGreat.  In fact, I like to call it “Wisdom of the Feet,” instead of Wisdom of the Crowd.

We’ve been soft alpha alpha testing for a few days, and are currently tracking the checkins of almost 1,000 users on an anonymized basis.

Also, follow @Socialgreat on twitter!