Akshay Patil became a software engineer at Google almost 7 years ago. Now the product manager for Google Realtime, the Google tool to search Tweets and other real-time updates from around the web, Patil announced this morning that he’s leaving Google to become the new Platform Evangelist for location-based social network Foursquare.
That’s a huge coup for Foursquare and a sign the startup will likely put a major new focus on working with outside companies and services to build on top of the set of check-ins and tips it’s amassing about venues around the world, people who patronize them and their interests. The social software developer ecosystem could really use a strong show of support, after Twitter’s recent moves have left many independent developers feeling burned.
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The Foursquare Application Development Interface has been relatively underutilized to date. It’s a sound bet that the man who managed integration of Twitter search and much more into one of the biggest shifts in Google’s history (going real time) is going to throw serious fuel on the fire of the location service’s platform next. Patil also worked on and announced the real-time-ification of Google Blogsearch in 2009. Business Insider saw today’s announcement about his move first, though that outlet didn’t have much to say about it.
Foursquare launched a radically new version of its mobile app earlier this month that included an ambitious and very well executed new recommendations feature. The service remains relatively small in its number of users, but it’s innovative far out of proportion and deeply inspiring to geeks and business owners small and large.
If Patil can bring some real-time savvy, some big platform development skills and some Google-scale industry contacts to the Foursquare platform, some very big things could happen.
Skepticism abounds, however, about the long-term developer friendliness of super-hot venture funded startups as platforms.
“The controversy around the changes in Twitter’s relationship with third-party developers has made it much harder to lure startups onto platforms like Foursquare’s,” says leading social data developer and ReadWriteWeb contributor Pete Warden. “By bringing in such a heavy-hitter, the company is showing how serious it is about overcoming that reluctance.”
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