Haunts.io — a companion app for Swarm that turns your check-ins into stories
I've been using Swarm since the early FSQ days - 15+ years and over 10,000 check-ins, a journal of my life that I felt compelled to keep. But I've had this recurring thought about how check-ins were like breadcrumbs that if you followed them would tell you a story about a person.
So I built Haunts, as in the places you visit repeatedly. It's a companion app for Foursquare/Swarm, using their APIs, that picks up where they left off - answering the question, what happens after you check in? With a sync to Swarm, you can check in the way you always have, and Haunts takes that history and turns it into stories about your trips.
Here's my idea behind my project. As I said, check-in apps only ever gave you part of the story. You'd log a place, maybe add a photo, and that was it, a single pin sitting on its own. What was missing was stringing those check-ins together, letting them add up into something that visualizes your travels instead of just recording them one at a time. Like you, I kept checking in despite years of no updates (I'm on Android) and a declining friends list as people stopped using it. But for me, down to 2 friends, I didnt stop because by then it wasn't about the app anymore, it was about the data. Haunts is what I built to finally write the stories I always wanted from my travels.
https://haunts.io/t/eb972427ffaa348d3565a796a0804556
Once you connect your Swarm account, Haunts goes through your check-in history and figures out your trips on its own, flights and road trips both. If you check in at an airport near your house and the next one shows up 2,000 miles away, it knows that's a flight and builds the trip around it. You can go in afterward and edit anything it gets wrong, rename things, adjust dates, merge trips it split apart. And if you forgot to check in somewhere, or couldn't at the time, you can add the stop later with the photo, the note, and everything else. A backfilled check-in earns no points and never touches your stats or the leaderboard, so it doesn't count as cheating, it just fills the gaps so a half-logged trip finally shows everywhere you went.
Haunts was built with several definitive objectives from the very start.
The anti-social social app. I left Facebook years ago and just recently deleted Instagram. I am so tired of the content that I didn't ask to see and the wasted time with ads that look like content and the general feeling that I am constantly being targeted for my money. The feed is only what you want of it - what you and your friends are doing and sharing with options to explore beyond.
Privacy first. Everyone starts out Private and your information is self contained. If you want to open up your journals to others, you can decide to share with just your friends of other users of the app to grow your feed to include people, like me, who travel often and love to post photos. You can share and unshare your trips easily.
No ads. None, and no plans or thoughts to ever have them. There is a subscription model built for frequent travelers and heavy users (these APIs and processing does have a cost), but its not enabled and for at least the next month or two everyone has full access to all Premium features automatically.
Now how it works and some of the features.
An Instagram-like feed. Built entirely from your check-ins, with your photos and videos woven in, so the feed fills itself instead of asking you to post separately.
Travel journals. A day-by-day account of the trip, built from your check-ins with an AI pass that fills in the gaps between stops. You don't write any of it. It's already there and you can tweak it.
Video recaps. One of my favorite features, taking the story and visualizing it. Haunts renders a video of the trip, flying, driving, walking, whatever it was, laid out as a timeline with your own photos in it, set to music. It makes one on its own, but if you want to direct it there's a full studio: pick the template, choose which photos land on each day, swap the music, set the cover frame, then re-render.
Live trips - Road Trips / Flights. You don't have to wait until you're home. Start a trip and it runs live, so the people following you can watch it fill in day by day while you're still out there. When you get back it seals into the finished write up.
Passport cards. One shareable image summarizing your travel, places you've been, countries, that kind of thing. Good to send someone or keep for yourself to show off your travels.
Lists. You can build your own curated lists of places, coffee shops in a city, a bucket list for a trip you're planning, whatever, and share them with friends or let people contribute to one together. If you're not coming from Swarm at all and you've been saving places in Google Maps instead, Haunts can import your Google Takeout archive directly: saved places turn into Lists, and your reviews and ratings come over with them. It's a real starting point even without a Swarm history behind you. Curated lists will become suggested lists for people visiting new places - you will be able to publish your lists of places you love and people who visit there can visit them, check in, and get recognized for completing your list.
Maps that show movement, not just pins. Flights show up as arcs across the map. Road trips highlight the roads you drove. It feels a lot more alive than a flat map covered in dots and visually looks like a much better representation of your adventure than just a pin.
Web parity. Except for check-ins, you can see and edit everything about your profile through the web. You need mobile for checking in (if you want to), but synced data is imported and configured on the web and you get more tools with the added real estate you dont have on mobile.
Wearables and Auto support. You can check in from an Apple Watch or a Wear OS watch without pulling your phone out, and there's Android Auto and CarPlay support so you can start a road trip from the car and let it build itself while you drive.
There's a web version and native apps for iPhone and Android, all getting real, regular updates. Every check-in it becomes a record that holds your photos, the weather that day, and the song that was playing, and an on-this-day card brings back what you were doing a year, or ten years ago as a memory. There's a lot on the stats side too, year-over-year totals, day-of-week patterns, stickers you earn for the places you hit, and a full Year in Review every December. And there's a friends feature, but it's not live tracking. You'll see something like "your friend was here two hours ago," never a real-time dot following someone around. I built it that way on purpose because I didn't want an app that was always recording where I was.
Haunts is what I always wanted Swarm to become and never did, a way of turning years of check-ins into a real record of the life I've been living.
I hope you find it as much fun as my friends and a couple hundred other people that have signed up already. :)
Haunts uses Foursquare APIs for venue information and nearby venues, we also use Google Places API for ratings and location information/hours.