[mintplant]

> Foursquare already had a massive database of check-ins — location information about the places its users most liked to go. And this data didn’t just include the place where someone had checked in. It showed how strong the GPS signal was at the time, how strong each surrounding Wi-Fi hotspot signal was, what local cell towers were nearby, and so on. Leveraging this data meant that Foursquare could still grab a good current location even if users were underground, near a source of radio interference, or facing some other signal obstacle. Chances are, some prior Foursquare user had seen the world through the same flawed eyes and reported his or her location.

This sounds more valuable as a technology than the social network side of the business itself.

If another company wanted to build up a similar database of location information, they could send out a fleet of its own staff all over the world to collect it, à la Google's Street View cars. But Foursquare has managed to sidestep all of this expense and infrastructure by harnessing its userbase as a massive, free source of data input.

Through badges, recommendations, and deals with local stores, they've created an incentive to provide the data they need. And through the mechanisms they have to prevent cheating in the game side of things, they've accidentally developed a way to ensure the accuracy of the location information their system can provide.

Licensing out this technology could become the long-sought-after profit engine for Foursquare, paying the bills for the flashy social network layer on top that keeps the data flowing in.

[mseebach]

>> It showed how strong the GPS signal was at the time, how strong each surrounding Wi-Fi hotspot signal was, what local cell towers were nearby, and so on

That quote struck me as very strange. Why would they collect all that data in the first place, anyway, if not to do exactly this?

[mintplant]

Foursquare has measures in place to prevent people from gaming the check-in system--to keep people from faking check-ins and gaining badges and mayorships that they didn't earn. From what I've gathered, they collected this information originally to prove that someone was really at the location where they claimed to be.

[VLM]

"to keep people from faking check-ins and gaining badges and mayorships that they didn't earn."

And yet, people claim bitcoins are worthless.

[pdenya]

> Licensing out this technology

Foursquare is looking years ahead, it seems unlikely that they'd switch to a short term strategy. You have to assume that this technique will be adopted by Apple & Google at some point.

[jgh]

I thought they already were using all this information to figure out your location. Google Maps knows pretty much exactly where in my building I'm sitting at with my laptop (I live in a long building spanning a block and the dot is over my apartment). So maybe not all that information, but going from the idea of fingerprinting a location with WiFi networks to other kinds of radio signal information doesn't really seem like a huge leap in thinking (though perhaps the implementation is tougher)