How the Explosion of Structured Location Data will Change Local Search

I recently started dabbling with NextStop and what really hit me is how much structured, user-generated content around location there now is on the web. For example, between foursquare, Yelp, Gowalla, Twitter, Facebook and now companies like NextStop and Blippy, there is a trail of all the locations that an individual visits, reviews, follows, friends and spends money at. While this data is interesting in its own right, especially to find what is hot right now, making sense of it all and connecting it to a person’s social graph so that he or she can get relevant, timely, recommendations is what really excites me. After all, if I follow/friend a restaurant, museum or bar on Twitter/Facebook and have also checked in via FourSquare and/or added it to a NextStop guide, I’m probably a huge fan. Now imagine the implications if an application could aggregate all of this fragmented data to create a portfolio of all of the locations an individual likes. For example, let’s say you are on the corner of Charles and Bleeker in NYC and want a good dive bar or in Cleveland and need a museum to kill a couple of hours between meetings. Instead of emailing or tweeting a friend or pulling up Yelp, you could use an intelligent app that aggregates your friends’ behavior across all of the social platforms to find the most popular places/activities amongst your social sphere in the area.  In many ways, this type of discovery is the opposite of search and why I believe that the evolution of the social web and explosion of structured content that it creates will significantly eat into Google’s business. After all, as applications start to aggregate user-generated data and create smart discovery functionalities, the need to search for something on Google will dissipate. Social Great is doing a very good job of location data aggregation, but I have yet to see the killer app that brings it all together for the user. If any one out there has seen anything of interest in this space, I’d love to hear about it.