Dazzling Timelapse Videos of Millions of FourSquare Check-Ins

For years, the location-tracking app FourSquare has been amassing an enviable well of data on how people spend their time, where they go, and what these patterns reveal about their commuting and entertaining behaviors. If you're on one end of the app, checking in on your smart phone at a neighborhood dive bar, the tool is a handy way to broadcast your whereabouts to your friends. From the other end – from FourSquare's point of view – each logged location contributes to a much larger picture of the life of whole business districts and cities.

Today, FourSquare is releasing a series of timelapse videos spanning a year's worth of data in six cities where the app is particularly popular. Each video covers an aggregated 24-hour period in the life of each city (when you're looking at 4 p.m. in Chicago, for instance, the picture reflects activity in the city at 4 p.m. across an entire year).