In this week’s print edition, on the eve of Facebook’s entry into the geosocial hustle, we played a fun game where we imagined what it’d be like if Facebook opened an engineering office in New York. The conclusion was that it could be painful for start-ups at first because so many talented developers would want to go work there, but great a few years down the line because those developers would eventually quit and start their own companies in New York. Part of the impetus for our little thought experiment was that a New York office would add a local dimension to Facebook’s competition with Foursquare, the fast growing downtown start-up that pioneered the location-based check-in model that Facebook is now adopting. For now that’s not happening– a Facebook rep told us there are currently no plans for a New York engineering office– but it seems the two companies will soon be working in close proximity anyway: according to TechCrunch, Foursquare is preparing to open an office in San Francisco.
Foursquare’s VP of mobile, Holger Luedorf, will work out of the office, as will VP of Business Development Tristan Walker. The building they’ve chosen is the home of the San Francisco Chronicle, which houses several other start-ups.
