Why do people keep giving money to Foursquare?

Matthew Panzarino writes on TechCrunch about why people keep investing in Foursquare.

Previously, we mentioned about how Foursquare is moving away from the check-in game by making check-ins public.

In this piece, Foursquare CEO Crowley wants to get things straight.

“The misunderstanding [in days past] was that Foursquare was about “who’s really going to check into a bar”,” Crowley says. Now, with the passive notifications and the increasing complexity of the signals that Foursquare is able to sift through to provide them, people are beginning to turn the corner on how they perceive it.

When they improve Foursquare, it is not just about making the app or service better. It is about how Foursquare can help other apps more than it already has.

Is there, for instance, a benefit for Instagram to know that you’re taking pictures at a specific restaurant or at Disneyland? Maybe. Could OpenTable’s utility be increased if it had access to a background parsing system like Foursquare’s? Almost definitely.

Foursquare’s current point-of-interest database is good. I speak with a lot of developers and it’s consistently mentioned as the go-to source of location data for apps that need it. Better than Google and certainly better than Apple — which actually uses Foursquare’s database to flesh out some of its place info. But what Crowley is talking about is far more than just a solid API and a big list of locations.

A lot of people seem to believe in the future of Foursquare, judging from its $600 million valuation. Just this week, it raised another $35 million in funding.