Over the past two years, foursquare has built one of the most comprehensive databases of locations all over the world with 15 million venues — even including food trucks and college classrooms. Today they’re making that data much more readily available to developers building other applications — and they’re offering a way to match those venues across other databases as well. Make no mistake about it, this is big news.

This move shows that foursquare wants to be the location platform for the web. Other companies have location databases, but they’re either very expensive to license or less comprehensive. This will enable a whole new breed of location-based applications on the web — with foursquare at the center of it all.

Developers have previously had access to the foursquare venue data, but unless their users authenticated with foursquare, rate limits severely limited the usability of that data. Today they’re raising the rate limits on venue searches with “userless” access to allow developers to feed that data to their visitors without foursquare accounts. They’ll even have access to foursquare’s unique trending data, which means they’ll be able to display the most popular places in real time, something no other venue database can offer.

They’re also launching a way for developers to match venues from the foursquare database to those in other databases. This will be a boon to many developers who’ve been looking for ways to integrate with foursquare, but were stymied by the daunting task of manually merging their databases to foursquare’s.

This is a big move for foursquare that puts them in the unique position of providing a continuously updated, real-time view of places all around the world. This should open many new avenues for developers. It will be interesting to see the many applications that will make use of foursquare’s data.

What do you think of the move?

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