Foursquare Will Find You. No Matter What.

Foursquare’s looking for a search suitor, and Google, Microsoft, and Yahoo are all on board to whisper sweet nothings into the geotagging maiden’s ear. For the remainder of this post, I guess, ‘dollars’ will be referred to as ‘sweet nothings’. If only.
Anyway, Foursquare’s dude in charge, Dennis Crowley, recently rapped with the Telegraph about the talks.
“Our data generates hugely interesting trends which would enrich search,” Crowley said. “We can anonymize 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.”
This is a really wicked awesome prospect, whether you’re a current Foursquare user or not. Think about it: imagine being able to search for a hip, happenin’ hotspot by popularity, or even by number of people – presumably, none who describe hotspots with words like hip, or happenin’. It’s a cool idea, and would serve not only the raditude of your night out, but the businesses would benefit, too – y’know, by your being at them. This probably won’t be useful terribly soon due to Foursquare still being in its infancy, but at the rate it’s growing, it’s only a matter of time.
Crowley didn’t mention a timeframe for the search deal ballyhoo just yet, as there isn’t one. But you can bet I’ll let you know when he does, and probably use a bunch of dated, confusing language to do so. Outta sight!
This will be awesome if it catches on. It would be great to be able to check out the hot and happening places. I have ended up in a dead club way to many times.
While this is a great idea on this surface, just think how easy it would be for an owner of a bar to game the system. He could easily pay people or offer the free cover to show they were patronizing his establishment. So those looking for the busy happening place would be deceived into think this was the spot to go to. It will be interesting to see how this works out.