Foursquare Will Start Charging For Data On Where Everyone Is

Flickr / dpstylesFoursquare cofounder Dennis Crowley

Foursquare, the location-based social network that's recently been struggling to find its identity, announced today it will charge businesses for access to its data, the Wall Street Journal reports.

The New York startup runs on users "checking in," or sharing their locations over the service. All of these check-ins, from restaurants to parks to train stations, Foursquare has saved and offered up to other businesses, until now completely for free.

Now Foursquare's heaviest data miners will need to pay a fee for access to this information, Foursquare's COO Jeffrey Glueck told the Wall Street Journal. He said of the 63,000 organizations that use Foursquare's data, less than 1% will be considered heaviest users.

This move echoes a similar decision Google made with Google Maps in February 2012. Foursquare was actually among the clients who moved away from Google's map service in favor of the open-source (and free) OpenStreetMap, Mashable reported.

Will Foursquare face a similar wave of data users checking out of their service? If so, it's not supposed to affect business too much. This new source of income is not expected to carry the company, which still is mainly based on local advertising. Glueck told the Journal that Foursquare is aiming to double its sales this year, though he's not ruling out that someday licensing could become a significant contributor to the company's business model.