> While I see the migration of check-ins to swarm as Foursquares way to say individual check-in data is largely useless, their data on latitude and longitude of businesses as well as their somewhat lengthy knowledge about the venues from user reviews is very valuable
The problem is that without ongoing individual check-ins the aggregate data becomes stale and useless, especially when you're talking about the kind of small businesses that are going to make up the long tail of any monetization strategy. There's no way Yahoo! would do this as a pure data play unless they have a plan to revive the individual check-ins.
I wonder if they are letting the smaller apps (like Untappd) be their check-in frontend and they basically just aggregate up all the locations the people have "checked-in". With Untappd, to create a new location, you have to download Foursquare and create it so it keeps users creating new venues and you immediately have a somewhat genre.
The problem is that without ongoing individual check-ins the aggregate data becomes stale and useless, especially when you're talking about the kind of small businesses that are going to make up the long tail of any monetization strategy. There's no way Yahoo! would do this as a pure data play unless they have a plan to revive the individual check-ins.