Social network player Twitter is tapping Foursquare's data trove to incorporate location into tweets.
From a first look, it's nearly a toss-up which tech player will benefit most from the partnership.
Twitter took a short and sweet approach in releasing the news, in a tweet on Monday: "Coming soon! We're working with @foursquare so you can tag specific locations in Tweets," and provided a link to its support page offering detailed instructions on how to use the new location service.
Coming soon! We're working with @foursquare so you can tag specific locations in Tweets: https://t.co/MwlLz5Pfvq pic.twitter.com/jATzXvbuV6
— Twitter (@twitter) March 23, 2015
The capability provides a much more detailed, granular data point regarding location. For example, instead of New York City, it'll be Grand Central Station, NYC. The service, available to both Android and iOS, lets users tag tweets with identifier data such as a business name, landmark and other points of interest drawn from Foursquare's extensive data warehouse.
Twitter is just the most recent of a growing number of services, including Pinterest and Flickr, tapping into Foursquare's location data via its API.
For Twitter, the big win is providing users with another value added to its social network tool. For Foursquare, it's validation that all its data collection and data points are an extremely valuable asset.
As Foursquare co-founder and CEO Dennis Crowley noted in a post on Medium, the goal has always been "to create a system that could crawl the world with people in the same way Google crawls web pages with machines."
The big idea behind Foursquare has been to "build a company that would bring our vision of context-aware services-software that can learn about the places you've been and can proactively recommend places you'd love to hundreds of millions of people," Crowley stated.
"We can be a successful company with the fraction of the users that Twitter and Facebook [have]," he said.
Crowley's vision - his company's focus - is clearly impressing corporate supporters.
"The Foursquare platform is a pretty fast-growing SaaS business compared to the other new SaaS businesses we're invested in," stated Ben Horowitz, a partner at Andreessen Horowitz and Foursquare board member. "To build [Foursquare's data business] from nothing would be exceptionally difficult."
Foursquare reportedly has collected 7 billion check-ins at 65 million places, boasts 70 million user-generated tips and 90 million "tastes."
Likely most important, in regard to where Foursquare's biggest revenue stream will flow in the future, is that more than 85,000 developers have created tools and services using Foursquare data.
