Over four years, Foursquare has logged over 3 billion check-ins from its 30 million users, providing the company with an astounding collection of location data which it in turn makes available to other apps. Shoot a video in Vine, scribble a reminder in Evernote, make a post on Path, or snap a photo in Instagram, and you can place-tag it. When you do, you’ll see a little banner pop up that says “Powered by Foursquare.” Any app developer can pull from this vast collection of place names. The company has become a powerhouse data provider to the internet at large, a sort of utility service for geographical information. “That place-data that’s baked into those other apps — that’s Foursquare’s ‘Like’ button,” says Anil Dash [co-founder of the social media software venture ThinkUp and Activate,]. Other companies with much bigger names (Facebook, Google) also provide geodata to developers, but Foursquare has done a superior job of keeping its crowdsourced data fresh. “Developers do an audit of all the available geographical databases, and they tell us that they came to use Foursquare because our database is simply the freshest,” Crowley says.