Foursquare updates app, partners with Gnip to sell check-in data

Even as Foursquare has rolled out a brand new update for its iOS and Android apps that include “super-specific search” results, it has announced that it is partnering exclusively with Gnip to distribute real-time places data to marketers and advertisers.

First up, Foursquare has upped the game with a new app refresh for iOS and Android that is supposed to give you “super-specific search" results, that will help you to find exactly the places where you would want to go to. The company has written about the feature in its blog saying “Foursquare does it better,” supposedly taking a dig at its competitors.

You will now be able to find places by searching for those that are open now and you’ve never been to, places that your friends have been to and serve a specific kind of dish or a place with a specific dish but within your budget. The update allows you to use language-based search queries to help you find a particular place. “One of the museums in Paris that my friend Matt went to last year that’s also near my hotel," is one way you can search for an establishment, “A burrito place I’ve been meaning to try (it’s on my to-do list) in San Francisco, that’s in The Mission and open right now,” is another.

Foursquare news day

The use of natural language to discover places is kind of reminiscent of Facebook’s Graph Search that uses a similar method to display results you can further fine-tune to get desired results.

You can grab the update for your Android devices from the Play Store here and for your iPhones from the App Store here.

Foursquare has also announced that it will be selling access to its data by partnering with Gnip, a reseller of social-media data that has previously worked with Twitter, Tumblr and Disqus on similar projects.

Opening up a world of possibilities for “data nerds”, Foursquare will now open up its pool of data for research as well as advertising and marketing companies. “Pretty much from the day we founded Foursquare, we’ve had a lot of requests from people who want to use our data for research,” Foursquare wrote in its blog.  “That’s because the general trends we can identify – like that New Yorkers are 2.1 percent more likely to get ice cream for every degree above 60 degrees fahrenheit, or that the busiest time to shop on Black Friday is 2pm – are really interesting, and they are something you can only figure out if you have Foursquare’s data.”

Foursquare will be providing Gnip with real-time data like each check-in’s location, its time and date and gender of the person checking in. The company says that market research companies will be able to use this data to get a grip on holiday shopping trends and campaigns. It will also help researchers understand popularity of a location or store on a more local level.