Check In on Foursquare to See a Company's Political Donations

How much money is a company giving to a political candidate? Now you can find out by simply checking in on Foursquare.

[More from Mashable: Somber French Cat Discusses Political Opinion [VIDEO]]

GeoPollster, a new "connected app," links with your Foursquare account then shows the political contributions of every company to which you've ever checked in, when the data's available.

"We added the 100 companies with the most venues [on Foursquare]," said Adam Kraft of GeoPollster.

[More from Mashable: 10 Great Apps for Android Tablets]

The platform's results are based on data from the 2010 and 2012 political cycles. OpenSecrets.org, an independent campaign finance watchdog, provides those results.

GeoPollster also assigns "partisan points" to its users, resulting in a score that the company says "help users understand how their spending habits subsidize politicians."

We tested the app and found that GeoPollster's data was rather scant. For upwards of 200 check-ins, data was only available for two companies -- Whole Foods and Waffle House.

GeoPollster has been around since October of 2010, but the check-in based donations information is a brand new feature.

As the app's name implies, its primary intent is to do "location-based polling." Users can choose their political party and GeoPollster will then collect anonymous check-in data with the hopes of gleaning insight into the different habits of Democrats, Republicans and other voters. At the moment, there aren't enough users to get statistically significant data, but Kraft told Mashable he hopes that time will come soon.

So far, 800 users have signed up for GeoPollster. Will you give it a shot? Tell us in the comments.

Image courtesy of iStockphoto, hocus-focus

This story originally published on Mashable here.

Source: http://news.yahoo.com/check-foursquare-see-companys-political-donations-163048033.html

tim lincecum ryan oneal file taxes online tupac shakur sledge hammer tax day freebies madison bumgarner