What do you get when you cross the most popular location-based social networking site with a powerful search engine? A way to find the hottest spots around town in real-time. Forget looking up stale reviews, figure out where everybody is at right now. According to Foursquare co-founder Dennis Crowley, this is exactly the type of relationship Foursquare is looking for with Google, Yahoo, or Bing. Crowley says that the data generated by Foursquare “generates hugely interesting trends which would enrich search.”
“We can anonymise data and use it to show venues which are trending at that moment. Twitter helped the world and the search engines know what people are talking about. Foursquare would allow people to search for the types of place people are going to – and where is trending – not what.”
Location, while wildly popular, is still mostly a misunderstood area. While millions of people flock to these services to share their everyday happenings, others look at them and wonder what the point of it is. This is pretty much the same situation we see around Twitter. The true power with these services is not the simple interactions, but the data those interactions create. In this case, we see a very interesting opportunity to figure out what places people are going to and not simply what topics they’re talking about online.
While Foursquare is enjoying a lot of success right now, they are only just getting started. Attracting users is only the first step. How they choose to use the data collected from users will be much more interesting and may help more users see what all the fuss is about. We are seeing the potential already with Foursquare layers, which combines your location data with information about the location to give you a deeper context about where you are.
Crowley doesn’t have a timeline yet for these search deals, but says that the search giants are not the only ones interested in Foursquare’s data. All three search engines have neither confirmed nor denied that they’ve been in talks with Foursquare.
via Foursquare ‘in talks with Google, Microsoft and Yahoo!’ about search partnerships