The hackathon lasted for 48 hours straight, over 6 continents. Over 500 developers hacked with Foursquare’s API at 30 different global locations. Foursquare set up four official hackathon locations in New York City, San Francisco, Tokyo and Paris. And out of all of that, 90 different “hacks” were submitted to be voted on by both Foursquare and Foursquare users.

Today, Foursquare is announcing the winner – and it’s Plan Your Next Trip.

Plan Your Next Trip simply does what it says it does – plans your next trip. It uses the Foursquare Explore API to plan out a 2-day trip to whatever location you are planning on going. It was developed by Benjamin Netter in Paris.

The Explore API allows Plan Your Next Trip to make a suggested itinerary based on recommendations from your friends (tips) as well as their past check-ins. Plan Your Next Trip also looks at what is popular all across Foursquare as well and suggests places to eat, drink, shop, and just tour.

I’m heading to Chicago for a few days next week, so I decided to give the app a spin. The app suggested that I eat breakfast at a popular cafe, visit the Art Institute of Chicago, “get some fresh air” at Millennium Park as well as try Heaven on Seven for a good creole dinner.

I especially liked the suggestion for 10 pm – “Get Drunk at ROOF on TheWit.” All in all, the app planned my day from 9 am to 10 pm and beyond with around 9 different locations to visit.

For the complete list of grand prize finalists and the people’s choice winners, check out the official Foursquare blog post.

Facebook’s engineers will get to work on Wednesday, November 5th at around eight in the evening.  Pedram Keyani used Facebook’s engineering feed to create some interesting expectations, writing, "In past years, Facebook Hackathons have been the starting point for all sorts of new features that rapidly became mainstays of the site, such as Facebook Chat, internationalization, the type-ahead feature in search, the friend suggester, etc. etc." 

 

And here’s an intriguing bonus: if there’s feature or upgrade you want to see, Keyani wants you to speak up.  "[P]lease accept our invitation to submit those concepts to the address hackathon-ideas@facebook.com," he wrote.  "The deadline is noon Pacific time, Monday, Nov. 3."

Ten people will be awarded with Facebook t-shirts for their trouble.  So far, suggestions put forth in the comments section of Keyani’s post favor the idea of video chat, making it something worth looking for.  The concept of a family tree tool also received a couple of nods.

Get in your recommendations soon if you want to shape the social network’s future, or at least some engineers’ sleepless night.

The better of two options might be a 2 PM to 5:30 PM session – see if your company will pay you to attend, and keep Friday evening to yourself, regardless.  But for everyone who’s going to be stuck at a desk or otherwise occupied, there’s also a 6 PM to 10 PM meeting.  Or, as Ben Lisbakken writes on the Google Code Blog, "You are welcome to stay for both."

Now, to move beyond scheduling and to the true meat of the matter.  Lisbakken states, "Google will be holding a developer hackathon to get you started on our JavaScript APIs.  We will be doing short introductions of the APIs and then breaking up into groups for coding and camaraderie.  There will be plenty of Google engineers present to ask questions and get help from."

This sounds like a good opportunity to collect business cards and email addresses.  And, if only because my lunchtime is just a few minutes away, we mustn’t forget about the aforementioned prizes and food.

RSVPs are required, but should be quick and easy to make.