Meet Apple's Most Important Internet Executive, Eddy Cue

We know vanishingly little about Apple's top executives. At most we get dribs and drabs of information, like CEO Tim Cook's bicycling regimen or design chief Jony Ive's Aston Martin.

Then there's Apple executive Eddy Cue.

Cue had been primarily responsible for Apple's iTunes Store, App Store, and iCloud email, calendar, and file services. He added responsibility for Maps after Scott Forstall, the executive in charge of it at launch, left Apple.

Other than that, we don't know squat.

So we turned to the unlikeliest of sources for insight into Cue: his Foursquare friends list.

Like pieces in a mosaic, Cue's friends and their stories combine to form a full picture of the executive himself.

Why Foursquare? We were inspired to check out Cue's presence on the location check-in service after rumors that Apple was pursuing a deal with Foursquare to improve its mapping service.

After we looked at his friends, though, we realized that these publicly shared connections might be far more telling than the accounts Cue follows on his lightly used Twitter account or his carefully locked down Facebook profile.

That's because, when you sign up for Foursquare, the app encourages you to scan your address book for friends' phone numbers—meaning that you tend to add the people you actually call or text. Founder and CEO Dennis Crowley has suggested this and other features make it more likely that you add your real friends on Foursquare.

Foursquare only lists first names and last initials, but a trivial amount of sleuthing and cross-checking on Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn identified some very interesting contacts.