Foursquare Eyes Search Engine Partnerships
In an interview with The Telegraph Dennis Crowley, co-founder of Foursquare, has revealed that the location-based social service is in talks with the major search engines, hoping to strike a deal which will use Foursquare’s check-in information to enrich local search results.
It will, Crowley assures us, be ‘anonymised data’ that is fed to the search engine to highlight destinations that are trending at that time, presumably boosting the ranking of a highly checked into restaurant when a user searches for a local bite. It sounds like a great way for Google, Yahoo! or Bing to add some human, timely context to local search. Just don’t complain when you arrive at your recommended eatery to find everyone glued to their iPhones trying to get the swarm badge.
[Original Telegraph article here]
All Comments
Will be interested to see how this develops and if Facebook make an assault on location services.
Will – Great post.
Location based discovery is the most exciting thing going on for marketers. However, I am going to watch Marc Cuban’s latest investment closely, because, unlike Foursquare, this startup will allow facial recognition via video, reversing the opt-in scenario and allowing businesses to automatically do checkins for their customers. This will essentially give storefronts the same analytic power as websites (if it works, and overcomes the privacy implications…).
Again, great post…
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