<p>Fred Wilson, at a recent PandoMonthly, called Foursquare "Maps with people in them." Maybe if this were 2009 it would be. But I'm forced to disagree with the iconic venture capitalist. Foursquare is, or rather could be, much more. I view Foursquare as a combination of three core concepts: friend stream, explore and lists, which owe their existence to a powerful and highly developed API, although that has been both a blessing and a curse. This provides a foundation to Fousquare's potential second coming, if the company plays its cards right, and it involves maps, but not necessarily with people in them.</p><p>The current Foursquare interface is a compromise where your friend stream comes up three-fourths of the screen to meet a small map. Dive into the map and if you have friends checking in in the past day, you'll see faces, perhaps faded like Marty McFly's siblings in Back to the Future. You'll also encounter icon-organized recommendations. Tapping on them is quite useful, as you can save venues to a list, check in or share the place with friends. But Foursquare, strangely, never turned into a chat app, and messaging is not possible within it.</p><p>Foursquare claims 40,000 developers but that is not descriptive of what or why those developers care about its API. The first location graph use case for developers who wanted the API was based on a feature that Foursquare did away with, because it was way too open, which was to show who was checked in to a particular place, most likely a bar. Sonar and later Banjo and most destructively Girls Around Me pushed the logic such that they were sharing data for users who weren't really using the 3rd party app but just passively giving Foursquare checkins automatically.</p><p>That turned out to be a dead end. One developer, Matt Newberg who was looking to create a way to identify users for his location-based casual games platform, playdo.pe, started with Foursqure's API but then had to move away from it in favor of his own service. He commented on how the early Foursquare API worked:</p><p><a href="http://pandodaily.com/2013/07/08/foursquare-because-of-its-api-is-much-more-than-maps-with-faces/">Keep reading...</a></p>