Foursquare, now with more yoga and mani-pedi

Just when Betabeat goes and starts ragging on Foursquare for not being aggressive enough about generating some real revenue, BAM, they announce a partnership with some of the biggest names in the daily deal and flash sale world. According to Spencer Ante at the Wall Street Journal, Foursquare will remarket bargins from these services, using its intimate knowledge of the shopping habits and current location of over 10 million users to target customers who might engage with these deals.

""We are trying to see if our targeting works and how users will react," Mr. Crowley told the WSJ. "The deals haven't been heavily targeted with some of these providers." For outlets like LivingSocial, Foursquare makes a lot of sense as a new form of distribution. Any unsold deal targeting a specific restaurant, spa or clothing boutique can be targeted directly to users who check in to that venue, or just offered up as an ad alongside listed places if the Foursquare user is nearby.

The deal will allow Foursquare, which has been expanding rapidly, to avoid spending too much on its own sales force and throw its fresh $50 million in funding towards hiring engineers and biz dev types.

Another intriguing option for Foursquare is the so-called 'API economy,' which treats data as a service to be leveraged or sold. As Foursquare's platform evangelist Akshay Patil wrote last week, the company's API is now being used by over 10,000 developers and provides the location layer for some big name apps like Foodspotting, Venmo, and most importantly Instagram. Patil says that Foursquare doesn't charge for its API yet, but its not hard to envision a future in which another revenue stream comes from apps like Instagram that sends millions and soon possibly tens of millions of requests each day.

For now, it seems, Foursquare is content to focus on growing the very best location-based social network, aiming to become the default geo-layer for mobile apps, and basically tap the business models of other companies in order to start generating revenue.

Dennis Crowley left Google a few years later to being work on Foursquare. Patil stayed at Google, where he worked on building out real-time search, integrating sources like Twitter into the search giants results. Last week Patil announced he was leaving Google to become a platform evangelist at Foursquare. "I used to flatter myself by thinking I knew what people could and would do with this kind of data... I no longer suffer from such delusions. The amazing output we’ve seen from the developer community just reinforces how important having a platform is -- letting people build stuff easily makes rich new experiences possible, all while making foursquare a more compelling product to use."

There is going to be a period of adjustment as Patil moves into a different flavor of real-time data. "Google realtime search has a very different relationship to the space of information sharing than foursquare. Realtime search focuses on searching the world and answering 'fresh'queries. On realtime search, you might track the latest developments from Fukushima, watch people brag about their March Madness bracket, or find confirmation that your city just had a power outage.In contrast, foursquare is much more personal - your location and social connections are at the heart of everything foursquare does. With foursquare, you can see where your friends are, find a great new gluten-free restaurant nearby, or share a recommendation about your favorite coffee shop."

Patil's biggest challenge will be giving developers the right set of incentives to build on top of Foursquare's data, and convincing them there is no risk they will suffer the same fate as folks who invested heavily in the Twitter ecosystem. "When I first started back in 2005, I was encouraged to spend some quality time browsing through the database and wrap my head around all the cool, and often secret, stuff Google was working on. It was so exciting to join a company working on such amazing stuff. I’ve only been at Foursquare a couple of days -- and we don’t have a database, per se -- but It’s definitely deja vu, all over again."