News that Foursquare is currently in talks with major search engines came today. If it hasn’t yet become complettely clear for those brands still ‘watching and waiting’ while social media continues to grow, social media and search are heading towards becoming inextricably linked and consequently, social media presence will increasingly translate into search engine results.


When Twitter integrated into the search engines, things became more ‘real time’ results oriented for those seeking up-to-the-minute information. Google started to include Twitter content in search engine results pages.


Facebook is obviously positioning towards dominating Google, and vice versa. Facebook isn’t quite as ‘real time’ as Twitter in regards to the instantaneous spread and sharing of information. Please note, I am not saying it isn’t as capable, it’s just that Twitter’s 140 character limit has made it the ‘fastest’ way to get to the point and therefore generally creates a faster distribution of information.


Foursquare wants to be part of this picture – but how? Well, quite simply, dynamic maps. Imagine if you could see people (in or out of your social network) in real-time congregating at specific locations: bars, clubs, sporting events. That would be a powerful way to figure out what people are actually doing – and more importantly
where they are doing it.


As the social media picture continues to evolve, search engines will figure out better ways to leverage the incredibly semantic and real-time data available into more relevant results for users. Of course, that’s only if the social media companies themselves don’t create their own search engine platforms (Facebook) and keep other major search engines (Google) scrambling for a competitive answer (Orkut hasn’t work so well yet, Google, but not a bad effort).


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