Yesterday I started using Foursquare seriously. I installed it on my Droid and tested it in a few location in Milan.
As you can imagine, I don’t think there are too many Foursquare users in Italy. I created a few new venues both where I live (Sardinia, the island…) and in Milan and saw that both a few US visitors and italian users created many venues in Milan, too.
The main point is: why is Google not offering a service similar to Foursquare or GoWalla? I asked myself this question yesterday while I was having lunch in a pretty popular restaurant in Milan. I saw it was not listed in Foursquare so I decided to add it. Unfortunately I didn’t remember the name of the street, so I went to Google Maps on my Droid and searched for the name of the restaurant. I don’t need to tell you that I found all the relevant information about that venue and could easily fill the missed fields in the new item I was creating in Foursquare….and for a while I searched for an option like “Add to Foursquare” on Google Maps…
The point is that Google Maps + Google Latitude could potentially provide everything to build a way, way better service than Foursquare, with advanced presence capabilities. That being said, why is not Google pushing it? Will Google ever buy Foursquare or a similar service?
The value in Foursquare is, in my opinion, all the users’ usage history, the places they visited, the comments they left and the frequency they visited a certain place. That is a big value in terms of advertising, data that Google is a master in leveraging. On the other hand, Foursquare can’t provide the huge database of venues and businesses Google maps relies on, a tremendous value that could take Foursquare to the next level.
What do you think?
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