Social media monitoring firm Sysomos is launching a free location-based monitoring service today it’s calling FourWhere. The tool mines publicly available Foursquare data (tips) and mashes them up with a Google map of the location you’ve entered. There’s no sign-up or account required. It’s just clever link-bait and enthusiasm-building from one of the emerging players in the social media monitoring market.

My first reaction to this was, “Can’t you just search for a location in Foursquare and get the same thing?” Apparently not. Foursquare seems to offer only the actual location (e.g. – “Toast, Louisville, Ky.”) not the area. (A search for “Louisville, Ky.” produced next to nothing.) If FourWhere provides that, it will be an improvement over what is available.