Assisted Serendipity is a simple little application that uses Foursquare checkin data to alert you when the "scales of love tip in your favor," i.e. when the male-to-female is on your side at a designated bar, restaurant or venue.
Foursquare users can select the venues they want to watch and set their preferred guy-gal ratio, even if the preference is ridiculously one-sided at a 5:1 ratio. The app will then notify the user when that ratio is reached at one of their selected venues, and he/she can head on over and go in for the odds-in-their-favor kill.
We happened upon the nifty night out, disaster-preventing app when discussing Foursquare's revitalized App Gallery with co-founder Dennis Crowley. Apart from a much better design, the new App Gallery lets developers submit their own apps, which is a a huge boon for Foursquare, users and developers.
Crowley didn't know about Assisted Serendipity until it was brought to his attention, which speaks to a larger problem around application discovery. Crowley says, "We've seen that more than 500 apps have been built with the API, but we only know about a handful of them. [The App Gallery] will let us pimp them out to our users."
[Img credit: Steve Laggat]