Foursquare continues to add features to its flagship Places API to embolden brands’ and developers’ location-based capabilities. The latest, announced this week, is a new autocomplete endpoint, which will let app developers give their users a better local search experience through suggested places.
Before getting into the details and drivers for the new update, what is Places API? For those unfamiliar, this is Foursquare’s tool that gives any brand, retailer or developer the ability to location-enable their apps. For example, it gives discovery, mapping or weather apps a reliable local search function.
There are several use cases this supports such as social-local apps. By having location-aware capabilities and a places database, apps can offer their users a way to find and discover places around them. Foursquare likewise benefits from the anonymized and aggregated movement data it gets back.
In total, the Places API has more than 100 million global points of interest. These are assembled from explicit check-ins from consumer-facing apps like FSQ Rewards, Swarm and City Guide. The data also builds from all of the apps that utilize the API, including whales like Uber and Samsung.
Foursquare’s Power Play Continues with Relaunched Places and New API
Just Like it Sounds
Back to this week’s announcement, autocomplete brings functionality that’s just like it sounds. It will return live search results as users begin to type within an app that utilizes the Places API. This includes places themselves and their addresses, with a ranking algorithm that prioritizes proximity.
Another way to view this is that auto-complete enhances the discovery part of the local search & discover use case. When users don’t know exactly what they’re looking for, they can start typing and be informed through Foursquare’s Places. This could also work well for category (versus name) searches.
Foursquare specifically calls out use cases that can benefit most from this new feature: shopping, delivery, ride-sharing, and mapping & navigation. In each case, users utilize a search bar to find what they’re looking for. And as a primary in-app touchpoint, better live search results could go a long way.
As such, this emboldens Foursquare’s value as a data provider. Given its ongoing work to fuel location capabilities for consumer-facing apps, this puts Foursquare in the meaty B2B2C space. The company continues to validate its fruitful pivot from consumer-facing app to location-data powerhouse.
The Physical Metaverse
Looking forward, Foursquare’s next conquest could be the metaverse, as we discussed on stage with Foursquare’s Ankit Patel last week at Localogy 2021. Though the metaverse is typically discussed in the context of virtual and interactive worlds like Fortnite, there will be a physical-world counterpart.
This will involve “digital twins” of the physical world that enable AR experiences. In other words, reliable geo-local AR requires data to tell it to place the right graphics in the right spots. This will happen through myriad signals such as device sensors (IMU bundle), but also through reliable location data.
The latter is where Foursquare comes in. Not only will it continue to be a valued part of the ecosystem for location-aware apps and location based mobile advertising, but also local commerce’s next era of visual search. And it’s already gotten started given its Marsbot experiment to power “audio AR.”
This positions Foursquare to future-proof itself for the coming years. Meanwhile, it’s worth noting that the Places Enterprise API was recently recognized as the “Best in Enterprise APIs” by API World. We’ll keep watching to see how this latest feature is received, and where Foursquare goes next.
