Another first for Foursquare – The Huffington Post and the Independent Film Channel (IFC) have launched campaigns to add their own ‘layers’ to the location service.

It follows Foursquare promising last week that with its new round of funding there would be big things happening in the next 12 months.

The IFC, for example, are asking their community to provide short descriptions of their favorite places that fit with the IFC’s “Always on, slightly off” positioning, which are then uploaded into a Foursquare database to create “your guide to the bars, barges and dinosaur-shaped eateries that matter most to the IFC community”. Foursquare users can friend IFC and add locations from the curated  “Always On, Slightly Off Guide to America” to their “To Dos” and opt to get the tips pushed to them whenever they check-in near a spot from the guide.

The interesting thing about Foursquare layering is that it allows brands to position themselves through location and that users can opt-in to having a publisher’s content pushed to them. As Read Write Web noted “it’s not hard to imagine any number of organizations mobilizing their constituents to mark-up the physical world like this”, and it’s a glimpse of a future where users who have opted in and friended brands or publishers are pushed content relevant to location (e.g. news stories, travel information, co-branded tips) when they check in.

At Huffington Post’s Foursquare page things are a little more serious – it is “posting tips for venues in our local coverage areas, and sharing your recommendations with our readers”.

The idea is that Foursquare users add these brands as friends and can then opt-in for content to be ‘pushed’ to them, based on their location. Information is supplied not from friends, which is the information people are mostly likely to see as reliable, but at least from those you imagine to be likeminded. Read Write Web has dubbed it “Location Layers“.

The possibilities for brands to tie with these services is also interesting. Now, if only someone with similar cachet like Time Out could do something similar for us in the UK…

Neil Perkin is the founder of Only Dead Fish and you can read his blog here, and follow him on twitter.