>Google is a mix of paid and free. Right that paid part is key. At this point Google's search engine is ancillary to their advertising business - admittedly

>Google is a mix of paid and free. Right that paid part is key. At this point Google's search engine is ancillary to their advertising business - admittedly one could not exist without the other and search came first. So you may be right that FourSquare's check-ins are ancillary to their driving offline traffic, but it appears they have not found sustainable revenues to justify their undertaking - if the value was there businesses would pay. Again I think FourSquare just needs a little innovation, by way of new feature(s), to generate the revenue and significant revenue by my estimates.