Foursquare data partnership with Google, Yahoo! & Microsoft?

In a recent interview with The Telegraph Foursquare‘s co-founder Dennis Crowley revealed that his company was in talks with the likes of Google, Yahoo!, and Microsoft about a data partnership.

Crowley alluded to being able to “anonymise [Foursquare’s] data” and and use it to show the venues that are trending at that moment. With Twitter letting the world, and the search engines, know what everyone is talking about this potential link up between search engines & a location-based social network would allow people, and again the search engines, to see where people are going.

Twitter’s initial deals were with each the likes of Google, Yahoo!, and Microsoft, allowing access to its real-time feed of information meaning the search experience became, in essence, ‘real-time’.

Foursquare’s location-based social network broke the two million member mark last week, just three months after acquiring its first million users. Foursquare is currently valued at around $95 million after recent investment  by a major venture capital company headed up by the likes of major social media industry players like Marc Andreessen (co-founder of Ning & Facebook board member) and Ben Horowitz (Fluther investor).

Looks like good things on the horizon for Foursquare; bad news for the likes of Gowalla and Brightkipe their trailing competitors and a mixed bag of results, depending on your viewpoint, for Social media users who lose one more piece of ‘data privacy’ to search engines in the name of better targeted advertising which is, in essence, what this partnership is all about.

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