(Photo: Onswipe)

Hey you, what are you doing next weekend? Would you like to flex your HTML 5 and Javascript skills with the potential to win some sweet prizes? If the answer is yes, Onswipe has a hackathon for you! If the answer is no, what's your problem anyway?

On October 19th, Onswipe is holding its first ever 48-hour hackathon at the company's Union Square-based HQ. The startup assures us, in bolded font, that there will be beer. The theme of the hackathon is HTML5--unsurprising given Onswipe's own underlying code infrastructure.

According to a post soon to be published on the Onswipe blog:

We know that [HTML5] covers a broad range of web apps, libraries, and general hackeries. That's the point! We're looking forward to creating cool HTML5 stuff with you, whatever it is you can think of.

Keep in mind you'll have Onswipe's arsenal of 30+ touch devices available for you to develop on, if you want. We have everything from iPads, to Galaxies, to Kindle Fires. In general you'll have the whole Onswipe office at your disposal, plus a bunch of Onswipe's best hackers.

The hackathon is a leadup to Empire.js, an event that will feature speakers and projects from New York's Javascript community. Hackathon winners will have the chance to win tickets to Empire.js, as well as some sweet iPads. You might even get to meet Onswipe's adorable office dog, Johnny.

"We've wanted to do a hackathon for a while and figured now was the right time to do it," Onswipe CEO Jason Baptiste told Betabeat. "Apps are clearly still bullshit and we think an HTML5 hackathon is a great way to get passionate engineers to build some awesome things for the web. Onswipe was originally started as a weekend hackathon-like project and maybe the next Onswipe will come out of this hackathon."

Interested participants can register here.

Ms. Koo (twitter.com)

If you've ever been to a hackathon, you're probably well-acquainted with the fact that the majority of attendees and participants are usually dudes. The paucity of gender diversity in tech is a controversial issue, but one that probably won't be solved by responding to the over-saturation of Y chromosomes with an all-female hackathon. That's where Hack'n Jill comes in.

Sponsored by Appnexus and hosted at the company's headquarters, Hack'n Jill is a weekend-long summer hackathon that will bring together 50 men and 50 women in an effort to "create an environment where both genders feel welcome to build cool things together."

The theme of the event, which will take place June 15th and 16th, is #HackYourSummer: "Think about what makes summer great — from going out and being active to chilling at home with friends — and be inspired to make it even better," explains the Hack'n Jill blog.

"We went through a couple iterations of the event, and we ended up settling on a 50/50 split of guys and girls because we wanted to expose guys and girls working together, as opposed to just have women working on their own," Kara Silverman, one of the event's organizers, told Betabeat by phone. "We also wanted to create female advocates through experience.

"We were looking to demonstrate that it’s your skillset that should be emphasized," added Eugenia Koo, another Hack'n Jill cofounder. "We really wanted to concentrate on promoting this diversity and really the type of positive outcomes that can come about through an event like this."

Ms. Silverman said she had been to many tech events where the dearth of women was clearly visible. "In the line to pitch at Startup Weekend Mobile, there were maybe 50 people and 5-10 of them were women," she said.

But in a city with far fewer female devs than male, won't it be difficult to achieve that perfect male/female ratio?

"So far the signups are really, really close to 50/50," said Ms. Koo. "We might have maybe three or four more guys than girls, but it’s right on target."

The Hack'n Jill team is hoping that with the success of their inaugural event, they can expand the event to an annual experience.

Mr. Tate

After years of reading Ryan Tate's piercing coverage on the free time and foibles of Silicon Valley's demigods at Gawker, Betabeat finally had the pleasure of making his acquaintance the other night. Spoiler alert: He might be the nicest dude in tech blogging, despite what the press releases regurgitation factories would have you think. Mr. Tate's former pen pal Steve Jobs probably put it best: "He's no dummy."

We also had a chance to peruse his new book "The 20% Doctrine: How Tinkering, Goofing Off, and Breaking the Rules at Work Drive Success in Business," which takes its title and subject matter from Google's much-admired practice of letting employees spent a fifth of their work week building whatever they want to. Like, say, multi-billion dollar revenue streams like AdSense or lifelines like Gmail.

But "The 20% Doctrine" goes beyond GOOG to examine how the idea of allowing free space to fool around led to innovative features and new ventures at Flickr, Odeo (perhaps you've heard of a little service called Twttr?), Jupiter Research (ahem, Dodgeball), the Huffington Post, and even in celebuchef Thomas Keller's empire and at Bronx of Academy of Letters. Mr. Tate talks to a number of familiar names like Caterina Fake, Y Combinator partner Paul Buchheit, and Google Reader creator Chris Wetherell.

The stickiest part of New York techies will likely be chapters tracing the history of hackathons, which crossed over into the mainstream at the Yahoo Hack Day when Beck came out to play for the coders and someone hotboxed the phone booths. (Etsy CEO Chad Dickerson, who used to head up Yahoo's developer networks, wrote the book's foreward.) We talked to Mr. Tate about goofing off in the era of gChat, when 20 percent doesn't work, how to make hackathons more productive, and why, contrary to conventional Startupland wisdom, you maybe shouldn't quit your day job just yet.

Before Gawker, you wrote for Business 2.0 and other more straight-laced publications. Did the Gawker connection make it difficult to get people on the record?
When Caterina Fake wrote me back she said she had done some additional research on me and that I seemed like a good guy. I got the impression that I need a little extra vetting. It really helped to have Chad [Dickerson] because he was one of my very first interviews and he was really generous with his time. I never did get to talk to Marissa [Mayer]. But it pushed me to find people like Chris [Wetherell], which brought a little more diversity to it, because he had an experience that wasn’t quite as positive. At the Huffington Post, some of the people I talked to ran it up the flagpole to try to get Arianna or Roy Sekoff and the response that came back was, you know, cold day in hell or over my dead body or something like that. For the most part, I think people were refreshed to be able to talk about something concrete and constructive.

You mentioned the emotional resonance of 20 percent time. For example, how hard Evan Williams tried to recreate the constraints from his early days after Odeo got derailed by copious funding. It seemed like the common thread was nostalgia for the early-stage experience.
People seem to either get bought into these large companies or they grow their companies into something large and significant and they want to sort of rekindle that early energy. It’s like they bump up against the inherent flaws in having a successful large company. They want to try to find some kind of shortcut back. Then the question becomes: Can they really see it to the point where it’s not just a nostalgia exercise? AdSense is Google’s no. 2 revenue line. But then if you look at a lot of the 20 percent projects that came after that they didn’t get the company to the bottom line growth that they need. They seem to be in the process of reconciling the dream of creating a startup-like atmosphere with reality. With a startup you can either drop that startup or iterate or pivot or just quit and move onto the next one. But Google doesn’t really have that option.

What’s Google’s current stance on it?
I’ve heard repeatedly that it is harder to do 20 percent now at Google. Chris, the Google Reader guy, made this point really well that it’s always been a fuzzy policy: You can do it, but how? What are the costs to you in terms of your bonus or what is the cost to you in terms of your career at Google? When do you start hitting a wall against actually deploying stuff?

Who is doing 20 percent time better than Google?
What I found in talking to other companies, especially at Atlassian and a few others, is that it seems to be quite possible to put filters and gating mechanisms in place. It’s not a complete free-for-all. Because you have to have a successful project at [Atlassian’s] Hack Day to get 20 percent days and once you’ve done a few weeks of 20 percent time, you have to get a peer or like four engineers to sign off on it.

Your book also gets into the perils of showboating. At the hackathons I’ve been to, it often seems like developers look for hacks that will crack each other up during the demos.
There’s a danger of hackdays degenerating into just showboating. I think Daniel Raffel nailed it later in the Hack Day chapter when he said, there has to be some prospect of creating an actual product otherwise you’re just gonna get engineers trying to impress each other. At Yahoo’s there were judges that were top executives, but there was no systematic process where those executives are taking the best project and turning them into product. There was no official pipeline. They had a non-technical CEO for a long time, Terry Semel, that the engineers did not connect with, so Hack Day lifted morale, but there were products that could have been very successful.

Like what?
You know how on Google Maps, you can drag the line to change the direction of getting from point A to point B? Like I want to take this freeway instead of that one, you can just drag it on the map. Well, I was told a guy had it at Hack Day at least a year if not years before that and it just never went anywhere. Then Google got all these accolades when they implemented it.

It seems like the other factor is that hackathons have gotten more corporate. You see a lot of sponsorship these days.
I think that’s the risk with any new business, that it will get adopted by the wrong companies in the wrong ways. They’re just totally not going to get it and they’re going to try to do a goofy imitation of it. That has probably happened with virtually every management technique that startups have pioneered so I’m sure there are companies that are giving out stock options that really shouldn’t be giving out stock options because their employees don’t care. Agile development is infamous for this. People say it has a lot of strong points, but it’s completely degenerated into consultants selling something as agile and managers using it to beat engineers over the head.

Who are the “wrong companies” to try something like this?
I had a whole chapter on Nullsoft, which was kind of an early way in which this went wrong. Nullsoft created Winamp, which was one of the first popular mp3 players. It was created by this guy Justin Frankel, who was very young and his company got bought by AOL for around $200 million. He got rich very quickly, but they said okay we’re gonna pull you into AOL, but you’ll be autonomous. We’ll give you your own office in SF. You guys can create whatever you want. They kind of let them play, which sounds like a great idea but then [AOL] got bought by Time Warner. So while they’re still closing the merger, Nullsoft starts churning out these tools that can be used for piracy, like Gnutella which was a very early peer-to-peer network. They created this thing called Waste, which was a way for creating darknets, so like private sharing networks. They also created this thing that took the ads out of AOL Messenger and replaced them with things developers thought were cool.

All of these projects were completely running against what you would want to do at a media company, but they were technologically very cool. When I interviewed Frankel, he thinks something could have come of them commercially, but if you’re doing that stuff in a media company [laughs] it’s not necessarily gonna work. If you’re not a startup and you’ve got to answer to the boss and sometimes the bosses are going to be boneheads.

Did you use the 20 percent time method to write the book?
Absolutely. I did this on Fridays. I was at Gawker Monday through Thursday. It actually made me more productive on Fridays to have this book to work on. Certainly by the end it was pretty tiring. It took me two years, and the original plan was nine months. I’ve been at Gawker four years, so I’ve spent over half my time at Gawker on a four-day week schedule, which is really nice of them let me do that!

Isn’t advocating more free time at work kind of dangerous when gChat, or say, spending time in the comment section of gossip blogs has already vastly diminished productivity levels?
Isn’t this going to distract people even more? I think that’s a totally valid concern. According to my own reporting, it seems like 20 percent time and similar programs is a way to recapture some of that time people might have spent goofing off on gChat or taking long lunches on Fridays. It’s a way to take time when people might be distracted from work and give them something else to do that’s at least potentially productive. From what I can tell, the bigger danger is overworking. Highly-motivated people, they’re not slacking off on their main stuff because they want to continue to be successful in their companies. It turns out they’re doing 120 percent of what they were doing before and 40 percent of the 120 is given to the project.

Management must be pleased!
I’ve been asked: Is this a way to trick employees into doing more work?

You frame setting up some kind of 20 percent program as a way to experiment and innovate while keeping your day job. That goes against what we’ve been hearing from Wall Street refugees and Startupland in general.
If you can bring yourself to do a startup and quit your job you absolutely should because that means you’re highly highly motivated to pursue your idea and you understand the risks and you’re willing to forgot that income. This is still not widespread enough where companies have [this kind of program]. It’s just a low risk way of approaching the idea. It’s good for ideas where you’re not as certain of success. Because with startups there’s a higher bar. That should be a grandslam idea in your head. This is a great way to get your training wheels. Be a serial entrepreneur without actually going to do all these startups. By the time you go to quit, it’s like okay now you’ve got these experiences under your belt.

It’s just interesting how many startup people in New York unequivocally advocate for quitting your job.
It’s a selection bias. But it’s really not as scary as you would think, to quit your job and do something like that . . . from what I’ve read on Hacker News.

Mr. Bloomberg

Greentech is so firmly associated with the West Coast, we’re not even going to bother with the jokes about hippies and solar panels. But if Mayor Michael Bloomberg has anything to say about it, that’s not going to stay the case. Today the mayor presided over the opening of energy-efficiency software company Efficiency 2.0’s snazzy new Flatiron offices (in the same building as Tumblr, no less), where he made it clear that New York City’s tech scene will not be ignoring the cleantech market, thank you very much.

Mayor Bloomberg led with an update on the city’s environmental efforts--they’ve tripled their solar power production by installing new panels on 10 buildings, for those keeping score at home--and announced that this summer the city will be holding its first green hackathon, dubbed “Reinvent Green.” (He also devoted rather a lot of time to a discussion regarding the virtues of white roofs.)

But before ceding the podium, he also took some time to trumpet his own administration’s support of the startup community. Via the city’s livestream:

We are hearing success stories like this across our tech industry citywide. Just two weeks ago I visited the city’s first tech incubator on Varick Street, where 22 companies have graduated and today employ more than 300 people. Our administration helped foster their growth and is taking the next steps to ensure New Yorkers have the skills to fill the jobs our blooming tech center is creating. And with the new applied sciences campus being built by Cornell University and the Technion Institute of Technology, there will be more and more innovative tech startups coming to New York City.

Anything that’ll help with our Con Ed bill once air conditioning season rolls around. Someone hack that, please.

Check out the mayor’s full statement here.

Mr. Moses. (Twitter)

If you were disappointed about missing out on Hype Up Weekend, the vaporware hackathon in San Francisco, here's an event for you: Tilt, a "brainstorming competition" where participants playing the role of "founders" will design product ideas around an assigned theme. The "startups" will be evaluated by participants playing the role of "investors," competing to get the biggest portfolio and speculating via an internal stock market that will run on the participants' smartphones. A real, live New York venture capitalist--exactly who will be announced on the date of the event--will make an appearance. It all takes place in one Saturday afternoon on April 21 in Tribeca.

You might be tempted to call Tilt a hackathon, but the event expressly forbids hacking. "This is about business ideas and their viability," the event advertises. "Design skills, production, marketing and branding are as valuable as software development." 

Justin Moses, a New York consultant and founder, organized the event to recreate the feeling of brainstorming with his cofounder.

"Essentially, we've taken the brainstorming out of a hackathon and made an event purely consisting of idea creation," he wrote in an email. "The major advantage we have is that it's not limited to hackers - but rather to talented individuals - designers, business types, marketers - interested in working at a startup."

The hackathon, or ideathon or whatever, isn't even about the ideas, he said. "This is a game; the ideas themselves are somewhat incidental," he wrote. "The goal is for different sorts of people to have the chance to work together and see how they do. perhaps you could vet a new co-founder, or meet your next collaborator."

Adam Parrish, a developer, consultant and founder of Neosavvy, is co-organizing the event.

Local founder Alex Kehayias described it to Betabeat as a "hackathon meets game show." In one of Tilt's promotional videos, he quips, "Tilt is a competition that makes people think on the fly about complex business ideas--startup ideas--and basically make them happen in four or five hours."

Sounds perfect for New York, which is short on technical talent and long on ideators. "Experience the startup life in a single afternoon; you might just find your next cofounder," says the site.

tilt: the investor role from tilt nyc on Vimeo.

We don't even remember this one.

"At some point, the hackathon bubble has got to pop." That's what Betabeat wrote 11 months ago in a story we called "Welcome to Hackathon Central!" about the astonishing abundance of these developer sleepovers, which now occur on a bus, on an island, with massages (all real examples!) and in increasingly shorter periods.

We don't know about other "startup hubs," but New York City is bonkers about hackathons. They're social. They're a great place for recruiters to meet developers. It's a way to promote your brand new API. It's a great place to slap your corporate brand and attempt to appropriate a cool DIY thing. Etc. There's at least one every weekend.

We figured at some point, the people who attend these events would start to feel burned out.

Were we wrong? Is the hackathon bubble indestructible? A pair of Internet snarksters have launched an Eventbrite page announcing a new flavor of hackathon: the kind without a product. 

"HYPE UP WEEKEND," which lists its host as Facade Capital, a "worldwide network of experienced business analysts and venture capitalists, bringing cutting edge expertise to drive profitable growth."

The project comes from Tim Hwang, founder of the ROFLCon Internet culture conference and Greg Marra, a web developer at Google in San Francisco. "We were particularly inspired with the success of Tacocopter," Mr. Marra wrote in an email, referring to the GPS-guided taco delivery helicopter service that disappointed so many when it became apparent that it was not real. "There are hundreds more nascent business ideas that are too big to realize in a 24 hour hackathon, but could change the world if they came to fruition," he said. "Hype Up Weekend allows these 'ideas guys' to shine."

Hard to tell how far Mr. Marra had his tongue in cheek over email. With the hackathon supposedly charging $10,000 for the category of "Since You Are A Person I Trust, I Wanted To Invite You To Join My Network On LinkedIn," there are only two possibilities: it's an April Fool's joke, or the hackathon thing has (ironically) jumped the shark.

Must be an April Fool's joke, we thought.

But the pair insist they are earnest in their effort.

"There will definitely be an event on April 14th - we're just in the process of finding a space for it now. Updates will be coming out over at @hypeupweekend," Mr. Hwang said.

"One thing I'd add to Greg's comments, at least on the reason why we're doing all this. I think hackathons are frustrating for an obvious reason - they fail to recognize that awesome development really can’t happen in such a limited timeframe so you end up with a bunch of half-baked half-products," he continued. "Awesome creativity can, though."

Seriously? A hackathon with the express purpose of producing "some fancy splash pages, the barest glimmerings of working code, screencast demo videos, press releases and the release of ultra exclusive private beta invites"? Wait. That's actually not much different from existing hackathons.

"I’ve been to hackathons in the past, and launched some cool products, but in 24 hours you can dream a lot bigger than you can code," Mr. Marra said. "Sites like Kickstarter prove you just need to get to an idea, and the public will bring it to market."

"The funny characteristic of the modern startup ecosystem is that attention around ideas seems to be the real valuable limited natural resource, not technology," Mr. Hwang said.

Are you ROFLing at us, Mr. Hwang?

The team presenting cLoudspeaker at NYU's Courant Institute. (via Kaushal Parikh)

Last weekend's hackNY Hackathon at NYU's Courant Institute culled some of the best young engineering minds from the East Coast to compete in a 24-hour code battle to the DEATH (okay, not really). But still--intense! The main project criteria for this hackathon? "Awesomeness," obviously.

"For seriously this is not a hackathon about building something with a huge market or a 'minimum viable product' or something," reads the Hacker League page. "Build something that blows away the judges with creativity and skill, either in design or technical winning."

By the afternoon on Sunday, three teams would place, but only one could be declared the first place victor. That winning team? cLoudspeaker, a collection of Princeton and Rutgers students that built an app to crowdsource music through laptops.

"Almost a year ago, I was looking for differences between two mp3s of the same song,"  said cLoudspeaker team member Eugene Lee, a computer science student at Princeton. "I found I could easily play both at the same time by using two computers, but more importantly, found that this made the song louder. I realized that it could be really loud if extended to many computers, so I added it to my 138 page list of random ideas and never saw it again until I unearthed it at hackNY while looking for an idea."

Mr Lee. said he thought that it could be a cool concept to pursue, but that "it would be impossible to do at a hackathon."

That's where Rutgers student Kaushal Parikh stepped in.

"I really liked the idea when I first heard about it," Mr. Parikh told Betabeat over email. "I was also really concerned about getting it done in the 24 hour time frame that we had to work within. This is where our mentors played a large role. We talked with them about the idea and they helped us narrow down the idea into what we ended up delivering at the end of the competition."

To get the hack working, the team used an API called Pusher, which allows synchronized messages to be sent to computers on the network. They encountered some problems with latency differences between computers, but employed the help of Amazon advisor Ryan Hubbard to get things working, they said.

When it came time to unveil the app, the team demonstrated the "crowd based power of cLoudspeaker" by triggering nearly the entire audience's laptops to play the same song at the same time (hence the name "cLoudspeaker"). The song they chose to blast from hundreds of computers simultaneously? A Deadmau5 song called "Strobe," spliced with clips of "Never Gonna Give You Up" by Rick Astley, naturally. When the familiar track began to play, a member of the audience shouted, "I KNEW IT!"

"I think the fact that we had a demonstration the audience could partake in was major to impressing the judges," said Mr. Lee.

"We were also able to Rick-roll them, so hey," the team added. Always a plus.

cLoudspeaker will be presenting their winning project to NY Tech Day on April 19th.

Foursquare's second hackathon.

Foursquare hosted its second hackathon over the weekend at General Assembly, a surprisingly gender-balanced affair at General Assembly fueled by Pepsi products and beer from Sixpoint Craft Ales. Developers in Paris demonstrated more than 20 new foursquare apps; hackers in Japan demo'ed eight or nine. The New York hackathon produced about 25 apps, hacks and mashups.

Let's just say there are a lot of new ways to play foursquare. Hackathon savant and newly-anointed Twilio evangelist Jon Gottfried and his team created Loo Review, a game for photographing and rating the city's public toilets. Betabeat also liked CRawsome, a hack from Yipit's Vinny Vacanti and Steve Pulec that texts venue managers when regulars and "social influencers" check in.

Perhaps 200 attendees were strewn across the floor, couches, and extra tables that had been set up in the main room, but only 50 were checked into General Assembly when Betabeat arrived in the afternoon for demos--probably because hackers had been checking in all day (about eight had stayed overnight to work on their projects). Just ten percent were present at the first foursquare hackathon in February, according to a show of hands.

As we checked in, foursquare asked if we were there for the hackathon. Checking into the event was necessary in order to view the list of presentations and vote. Voting for the global champion will take place over the rest of this week.

The grand prize is the foursquare title belt and dinner with foursquare co-founder Naveen Selvadurai and investor Bryce Roberts.

"Where are you going to take the winner for dinner?" someone in the audience asked.

"I've been thinking about that," said Mr. Selvadurai, a notorious East Village foodie. "I've been writing in my diary. If you have a place you want to go, I'll take you there. But make sure you get dressed up real nice."

The winners of the popular vote in New York? Veteran fourquare hacker Jonathan Wegener and Jason Pope took third place for FacePlace, an app that changes your foursquare profile picture based on the type of venue you've checked in to. Second place went to DigiDJ, a mobile jukebox created by Christine Horvat and Brian Yang, assisted by Venmo employees. DigiDJ, which also won for best use of the Spotify API, lets patrons pay $.99 to add a song to the playlist and $5 to have it play next.

First place went to Yipit employee Tal Safran and former foursquare employee Max Stoller for their Census data hack, "How ____ are you?" Authenticate the app with foursquare and it'll tell you how black, white, Asian, male, female, married, divorced or single you are based on the zip codes you check into.

Hackers also built two scavenger hunts, a Dealburner-esque app that shows when Yipit has tagged a deal at the venue you've checked into, and an app that shows you the most recent New York Times articles that mention the venue you've checked into.

Other hacks of note:

-Bimbimbob: a platform for motivation, the app lets you set a goal-say, get in shape--and have friends pledge money via Venmo. But the pledge doesn't charge until you've checked into the gym 15 times, for example.

-Homefield Advantage: looks at check-ins at baseball stadiums and tallies up where fans are from.

-PickSq: allows users to vote on a venue. For example, where to go for the hackathon afterparty.

-Hoppin or not: Christina Cacioppo of Union Square Ventures presented her first hack, which displays happy or sad bunnies depending on how many people are checked into the venues that surface after a keyword search

-Fourguide: Created by Will Vanderhoef, Josh Ross, Jackie Li, Shaun Bava. "Create a Foursquare list of places along your Runkeeper activity routes; then use your Android device to automatically check in to places on your lists."

There can be only one winner.

Foursquare is being very strategic with its hackathons! We remember the first foursquare hackathon like it was yesterday. It was at General Assembly. It was right before South By Southwest. GroupMe built a foursquare app and subsequently broke out; Parisian hacker Pierre Valade built Agora, which eventually led to an internship at foursquare and the banning of the app by Twitter for misdemeanor spam.

As a result of the first hackathon, SXSW attendees had plenty of new foursquare apps to play with in between sessions of real foursquare in the startup's PepsiMAX-sponsored court and awareness of the API spread amongst developers. Foursquare is pushing next weekend's Global Hackathon just as cunningly. Remember when Meetup.com declared a National Pug Meetup Day and sent emails to pug lovers they found on the internet, encouraging them to create their own pug meetups in their cities?

Foursquare's developer community asploded after the first hackathon, the company said.

So, when we sat down a few months ago to plan our next hackathon, it was obvious that we couldn’t just host it in one city. We decided to do something a little crazy: organize a giant global hackathon ...

We’re super excited to invite you to join the worldwide foursquare community on the weekend of September 17-18th for a round-the-clock, round-the-world hacking session! We’ll be officially hosting sites in New York City, San Francisco, Tokyo, and Paris, but we encourage developers everywhere to band together and build their dreams atop the foursquare API.

To help with this, we’ve created a Meetup Everywhere page where you can join other hackers in your city (or even suggest a venue where people can get together and code).

And foursquare has done something else to make this sweet deal even sweeter: a wishlist, authored by co-founder Naveen Selvadurai. It's long, it's on GitHub, and it's super-nifty. "An app to play an intro song on the sound system when the mayor checks in" is one suggestion. Ooh! Here's our theme song.

More suggestions from Mr. Selvadurai:

• A choose your own adventure game where with each check-in, it suggests 3 nearby things to do next. (Maybe you get to choose a category?)
• A radar app that alerts you if a friend checks-in within .25 mile of your house / current location
• Game challenging your friends to see who can go to the Gym the most this month

• iPad app