With the SXSW conference approaching in Austin, we are seeing a lot of geo-location launching this year. A lot of startups are taking advantage of Foursquare’s APIs in particular to get their geo apps quickly out of the gate.
Take FourWhere. It is a pretty basic mashup of Foursquare comments and venues overlayed on Google Maps. You can search by city and neighborhood, and see all the recent tips from people who have checked into various nearby restaurants, bars, stores, and offices. The site forces you to right-click to see comments or venues instead of just having a menu in the side, but it does the job.
I’m kind of surprised Foursquare doesn’t offer the exact same functionality, but that’s what APIs are for. Sometimes startups need other startups to show them what they should be doing.
FourWhere was created a demo app for SXSW by social media analytics firm Sysomos. It plans to add more data from services like Yelp, Twitter, and Gowalla in the future, which brings up the issue of whether it picked the best name.