19 July 2010 | Author: D. Warburton Search Copywriter

Foursquare talks search with Google, Microsoft, Yahoo!

Foursquare co-founder Dennis Crowley has revealed that the location-based social networking service is currently in talks with all major players in the search industry to share the company's data.

Speaking to the Telegraph, Crowley said Foursquare was discussing partnerships with "everyone" - which would include search kings Google, Microsoft and Yahoo! - to "enrich" their search engines with trends generated by the location-based data.

"We can anonymise data and use it to show venues which are trending at that moment," Crowley explained, voicing the example of Twitter, which previously signed deals with the three major search players to incorporate real-time information feeds into results.

"Twitter helped the world and the search engines know what people are talking about," he continued. "Foursquare would allow people to search for the types of place people are going to - and where is trending - not what."

The co-founder did not specify a timeframe for the deals, and search companies have thus far refused to comment on the news - though they haven't denied it either.

The rising star of the social sphere, the Telegraph reports that Foursquare signed up its two millionth member last week - more than doubling its membership since April - and recently raised $20 million (£13.3 million) in investment capital to expand its operations.

Discussing whether Foursquare faced competition from Gowalla, which launched at the same time last year and also uses geo-tagging, Crowley explained: "We are more social than Gowalla and ultimately have different visions moving forward. They are excited about different things."

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