Location startup Booyah is the first to tap Google's new Places service

Booyah, which has been on a tear of late after announcing it raised $20 million earlier this week, has landed a spot as one of Google’s first partners for Google Places, a service that lets local businesses manage their presence on Google.

Booyah’s location-based game app, MyTown, which has more than 2 million registered users, will take a freshly-launched application programming interface from Google Maps and show users the 20 most popular places around any given location. That doesn’t sound particularly different from what already exists in the app and many other location-based games, but the advantage Google has is speed and a wealth of place data.

“We need to have lightning-fast search so when players look up locations, they can do it and check in quickly,” said chief executive Keith Lee. “We’ll also be able to expand into dozens and dozens of countries without having to do individual deals with different directories because we’ll be able to leverage Google’s existing data.”

It’s also a two-way relationship. MyTown users will eventually have the ability to add and update Google Place data through the app. Ultimately, the search giant will want to have as many location app partners as possible to ensure it has the most accurate and continuously updated repository of mapping data.

“We’ll ultimately become a consumer channel for Maps,” Lee said. “We’re happy to have this leading advantage for the time being.” Lee added that the API access was free.

The Google deal doesn’t preclude MyTown from using place data from other companies like CitySearch. In fact, Booyah built a mediation layer between it and all the location data providers so it can offer the most accurate set of places around a player at any given time.

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