14 DAY TRIAL // Foursquare is in talks with search engines to provide real-time location and other related data to enhance search results. The company’s founder, Dennis Crowley, said that Foursquare is in talks with “everyone” including the big three, Google, Yahoo and Bing. The idea is to license the data that its users generate so that search engines can provide real-time information on what places are the most popular at any given time.
“Our data generates hugely interesting trends which would enrich search,” Crowley told the Telegraph. “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.”
A simple parallel can be drawn with Twitter which also signed deals with all major search engines, Google, Yahoo and Bing, to provide unrestricted access to the full data stream. These were actually Twitter’s first significant financial deals and are said to have generated quite a bit of revenue for the company.
Foursquare wants to do the same, but with location data. Local searches could be enhanced by providing information on what places, bars, restaurants, are the busiest or liveliest in real-time, handy when you’re planning out where to go on a Saturday night or you’re already out and wondering where to go next.
Obviously, this only works with in places where Foursquare is popular enough to be useful. While the service has recently passed two million users, it doesn’t have the scale to make these kind of features relevant to a mainstream audience. Then again, Foursquare is growing at a rapid pace and has doubled it’s audience in the past two months. Unlike Twitter, though, it does face some stiff competition.