Foursquare is not going to be an important company in Meat Space search and discovery. At best they're a niche company. Google is the clear leader. Maps is the killer product, and no one can touch Google, because it takes time and billions to make a proper Maps product. Android, Google Glass, Autonomous cars. They are spending billions of dollars going after this market. In many areas they are decades ahead. If there is any competition to Google here, it will come from Facebook, not Foursquare.
The analogy that Foursquare will do to local search what google did for web-search is deeply flawed. Google created the ecosystem for web-search by buying up all the toolbars, and powering everyone else's site search, they they gave away free ecosystem products like gmail to keep people locked in. they pushed all the other players out and the English Language Market into their de facto search monopoly. They have already done this through android and Maps for the local search product.
Foursquare is an app. Google has hardware, an operating system, an ecosystem, and a database that is vastly, vastly larger and better than FourSquare. For Google to copy a Facebook Home like integration with their Maps product in Android, and then offer an AdWords type auction for local businesses to bid on customers in meat space is trivial. It will happen, but not yet, because smartphone penetration is not quite there as far as ubiquity and 'understanding'.
edit: changed offline to meatspace because my usage was confusing, since we're really talking about AFK as opposed to 'offline' which is pretty impossible these days.
The analogy that Foursquare will do to local search what google did for web-search is deeply flawed. Google created the ecosystem for web-search by buying up all the toolbars, and powering everyone else's site search, they they gave away free ecosystem products like gmail to keep people locked in. they pushed all the other players out and the English Language Market into their de facto search monopoly. They have already done this through android and Maps for the local search product.
Foursquare is an app. Google has hardware, an operating system, an ecosystem, and a database that is vastly, vastly larger and better than FourSquare. For Google to copy a Facebook Home like integration with their Maps product in Android, and then offer an AdWords type auction for local businesses to bid on customers in meat space is trivial. It will happen, but not yet, because smartphone penetration is not quite there as far as ubiquity and 'understanding'.
edit: changed offline to meatspace because my usage was confusing, since we're really talking about AFK as opposed to 'offline' which is pretty impossible these days.