• GigaOm, Monday, August 16, 2010 5:22 PM

For Foursquare to grow, the company needs more sites to use its application-programming interface, the company's co-founder and CEO Dennis Crowley recently told GigaOm. That will allow it to build an ecosystem around Foursquare's data. Furthermore, "The more apps are built on its API, the easier it is for Foursquare to grow faster, which in turn would allow the company to start monetizing its efforts to bridge physical and digital worlds," GigaOm writes.

"Foursquare (and others like it) can essentially bring a cost-per-action business model to the real world, perhaps either supplanting or complementing traditional forms of advertising." Bigger picture, "When I look at Foursquare and other such companies, I finally see a solution to the conundrum around local advertising," boldly writes GigaOm's Om Malik. "Everyone from Yahoo to Google has viewed local advertising (long the preserve of newspapers and yellow pages) with lustful eyes, with little or no success." By marrying geo-location to behavior targeting and adding commerce on top, one can finally start to see some answers, he concludes.

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