AUSTIN, Texas Using your phone to navigate a new city, or even your own neighborhood, used to require a bunch of single-purpose apps. We relied on separate bits of software to find a place to eat, locate a restaurant, and check in upon arrival.Now, even the most basic apps can do all of these things at once. Location has seeped into every corner of the mobile social experience. In fact, it’s expected to be there. Every time you share a digital tidbit a photo, a video, a tweet you’re invited to peg it to a place in the physical world, and any social app that doesn’t provide that option comes across as incomplete, even broken.
“If it doesn’t have location, it feels like there’s a missing limb there,” says Anil Dash, co-founder of the social media software venture ThinkUp and Activate, a consultancy. I spoke with Dash prior to the keynote session he hosted here at the South by Southwest Interactive conference on Monday, where his interview subject was none other than Dennis Crowley, the CEO and co-founder of Foursquare, the internet’s premier location service.
Foursquare is undergoing a transformation of sorts, from a mobile location-reporting and recommendation tool to the social web’s key supplier of place data.
“Our place database has over 50 million points in it,” Crowley says. “It’s a living, breathing dataset a really amazing asset for us.”
Read also:
Foursquare CEO Crowley: Early fun and games were mistake (Upstart (blog))
Dennis Crowley On Using Foursquare To Build The Marauder's Map (TechCrunch)
At SXSW, Foursquare CEO admits early mistakes (Austin Business Journal)
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