Foursquare eyes a search deal

Foursquare has its sights on a deal with a major search engine, according to the company’s co-founder, Dennis Crowley.

Crowley told the Telegraph in a Monday article that the application company, which helps users broadcast their whereabouts to their friends, is in talks with Yahoo, Google, and Microsoft. All three search companies “failed to deny” the talks, the report says.

Geolocation apps such as Foursquare have raised questions in Washington about user privacy, and whether people are inadvertently oversharing their personal data. The House Energy and Commerce Committee took the questions up at a hearing earlier this year.

Crowley gestured to those concerns in his interview. “We can anonymise data,” he noted. A search partnership would allow users to see “venues which are trending at that moment.”

When Twitter struck a deal with Microsoft and Google, users’ Twitter statuses became searchable on Bing and Google.

“Twitter helped the world and the search engines know what people are talking about. Foursquare would allow people to search for the types of place people are going to — and where is trending —not what,” Crowley said.

Foursquare, which has two million members, is valued at $95 million, an analyst tells the Telegraph.