The Foursquare Users API serves as the gateway for customers to manage user identities and authentication flows necessary for integrating with Foursquare's Places data feedback mechanisms (Placemaker APIs and Placemaker UIs). It offers two primary groupings of endpoints, each catering to distinct integration strategies: Managed User Endpoints for white-labeled, seamless integration, and User Authentication Endpoints for direct integration with Foursquare's Placemaker UIs.
There are two primary ways to integrate your user-base with Foursquare's Placemaker functionality: via managed users or via 3rd party account linking.
Managed User Endpoints
This set of endpoints empowers customers to create, manage, and refresh authentication for users within the Foursquare system on behalf of their own application users. This approach is ideal for white-labeling the Foursquare integration, as it removes the requirement for end-users to explicitly create a Foursquare account. Instead, the customer's application handles the user management and builds native UIs on top of Foursquare Places APIs. In the case of Placemaker API feedback, this per-user calibration also ensures higher-quality contributions are processed efficiently.
User Authentication Endpoints
If you'd prefer to use our Placemaker UI directly in your application, you can achieve this by having your users link their Foursquare accounts to your application. When used in conjunction with our Users API session token endpoint, this provides a quick way to leverage Foursquare's existing, feature-rich Placemaker UIs, offloading UI development to Foursquare.