It looks a lot like FoodSpotting, but with more and better social hooks: influencer scores, embeddable widgets for food bloggers and a prominent news feed of food photos from your friends.

I'll be curious to see how the service deals with the Cold Start problem; tight Twitter integration is one part of it but I'm not sure there's much for me yet in my town of Portland, Oregon.

Brightkite co-founders Martin May and Brady Becker are behind Forkly and have clearly done a lot of work on it since the first murmurs of its existence surfaced on TechCrunch eleven months ago.

The app looks less like a neighborhood foody news wire, like Foodspotting or a Facebook for your stomach's eyes, and more like a Yelp plus Pandora for particular dishes.

Brightkite was an early mover in the "location" space, even coming first in a poll that asked ReadWriteWeb readers this spring which location-based service they planned to use at SXSW. One of the key features readers said they liked about Brightkite was its attention to privacy, allowing users to finely tune what location data they revealed and to whom. But since as location-based networks have taken off in popularity this year, Brightkite's name has not made headlines quite like its competitors Foursquare and Gowalla have.

According to Brightkite, this pivot will allow the company to focus on becoming "the default text messaging application on all phones" - which one might note, is a field no less crowded than location-based check-in services.

For those who want to get their check-in data from Brightkite, you have until December 31 to download it via RSS.

Below we list some example check-in apps, so that you can check out this phenomenon yourself!

Starting with the obvious, Foursquare has been one of the trendiest apps of 2010. For newbies who may not be familiar with it, Foursquare is a mobile app that allows you to check in to any location - cafes, sports stadiums, work places, restaurants, bars and more. Foursquare is also integrated with Twitter and Facebook, so if you wish you can publish your check-in to those services. Like many check-in apps, Foursquare offers game-like "rewards." These mostly consist of fun badges and the ability to be "mayor" of a specific place.

I use Foursquare selectively, mostly as a way to occasionally update my Facebook friends about where I am. Others use it compulsively, checking in to every single place they go to and publishing it all on Twitter and/or Facebook. We're still in the early stages of location check-ins. The rewards should get better - for example discounts at places you frequent a lot - and services like Foursquare (and perhaps the new Facebook Places) will get more useful the more that people use them.

GetGlue

GetGlue is a service where users check in to watching TV shows, reading books, listening to music - indeed, to just about anything. It has experienced strong growth this year. Founder and CEO Alex Iskold told us recently that "in the month of August alone we saw over 8 million ratings and check-ins." That's about 300,000 ratings and check-ins every day. GetGlue currently has over 600,000 users and is, according to Iskold, riding "an upward trend in the social entertainment market."

Iskold said that emotion drives a lot of the check-in behavior for GetGlue. "Which books you like, which movies you like, which shows you watch," Iskold told us, "it's self-expression and something that we'd like to discuss and tell each other about."

Shopkick

Shopkick is a check-in app for the iPhone, which launched in August. While Foursquare is more of a social tool, Shopkick is focused on monetary incentives. As ReadWriteWeb's Mike Melanson reported on the launch, "rather than rewarding users with virtual goods or contextual information like user reviews, it goes straight to the heart of the matter - kickbacks, discounts, and real-world incentives."

As Mike further explained, the idea is that everything you do earns you points, or "kickbucks," which can be redeemed for anything from Facebook Credits to gift cards. Check in to a store and get a couple of points; physically walk in and get even more points. Scan the barcodes of certain items and the points roll in. As you go, the app begins suggesting deals and offering discounts.

Shopkick launched with five big names as partners: Macy's, Best Buy, Sports Authority, American Eagle Outfitters and the Simon Property Group (an operator of malls across the country).

Foodspotting

Foodspotting is most easily described as 'Foursquare meets food.' It lets users upload photos of their favorite dishes, rate dishes and users, earn reputation points, and follow places, dishes and community members.

As we wrote in November when the service launched, the difference between Foodspotting and local business review service Yelp is that every Foodspotting review is a positive one. Instead of showcasing restaurant rants, Foodspotting offers a visual menu of customer favorites.

Tunerfish

Tunerfish is a TV-focused check-in app developed by Comcast. Like Foursquare, it makes heavy use of game mechanics. Users can earn badges for watching TV shows and "influence points," based on how many users check in after following their links.

As Marshall Kirkpatrick wrote in June, the TV industry is hoping that these kinds of applications will help it strike back against audience attrition and provide a new channel for content producers to market their work. "From a business perspective," said Comcast's social technology group senior director of product, Mike Berkley, "it's about providing awesome marketing channels for content providers. The analogy is that Foursquare (in theory) is a great marketing tool for local businesses... these TV check-in apps are a great tool for TV networks."

Tell Us Your Favorite Check-In Apps

We've listed five of our favorite check-in apps, but there are more out there that we could've mentioned. List your favorites in the comments, so that we can all check into them!

"It's huge and it's increasing," said Michael Becker, a director at the Mobile Marketing Association. "Location is going to play an increasingly critical role in enabling successful consumer engagement through and with the mobile phone."

Big name advertisers seem to be throwing money at location-based services. Brightkite is reportedly charging between $10,000 and $20,000 for local promotions. Foursquare seems to be announcing a new A-list corporate partner every week, including Starbucks and MTV. And Shopkick, the treasure hunt of consumption, launched with Best Buy, Macy's and American Eagle among its sponsors - which had to install special audio transmitters in all their participating stores just so the app will know when a user walks in.

Advertisers are excited because location-aware ads really work, Becker said, citing a study that showed nearly 50% of users who are shown a location-aware ad on a mobile device will "take some action," beating out text messaging (37%) and Web display ads (28%).

But isn't that because location-savvy ads are fairly novel? Advertisers were also excited about display ads in the early days of the Web, when users were so unaccustomed to browsing that they clicked on anything that caught their attention. Doesn't it seem like the higher engagement reported for location-aware ads could be because a user is not used to seeing her city or neighborhood mentioned in an ad on her phone?

Newness may be inflating the numbers a bit, Becker acknowledged, but advertisers will just create more engaging and sophisticated ads as time goes on. But location is just one of many important factors in mobile marketing. Advertisers also consider a consumer's age, type of phone, even time of day.

"Location is not necessarily the goal of the interaction. Rather, location is a piece of information that provides context to the user experience and can create a more relevant and engaging interaction with the consumer," Becker said.

Advertisers in the U.S. will spend $1.8 billion on location-aware marketing in 2015, according to a recent report by market research firm ABI Research. (By comparison, advertisers in the U.S. spent $10 billion on search advertsing in 2008.)

Not every advertiser will care about location, said Neil Strother, a director at ABI Research who put together the report. For restaurants and bars, real-time location is crucial. But for NBC or Coke, not so much.

And there are lots of companies hesitant to join in the location game, Strother said. That's because of inexperience and fears about threatening consumers' comfort level. "The next few years will be very important for companies to get it right and not abuse the location information they're getting," he said.

But almost all of the check-in apps integrate some form of mobile advertising. After months of experimentation with various formats, marketers are starting to discover what strategies actually work.

Case in point: analyst firm ABI Research has just released a new study that finds businesses are primed to spend $1.8 billion on location-based ads in 2015, a somewhat surprising number given the small crowd of early adopters currently using check-in apps.

According to ABI Research's Neil Strother, check-in apps may raise privacy concerns among some users today, but those issues can be overcome by offering consumers deals, discounts and rewards. The "value-exchange" of receiving these rewards will be high enough that consumers won't mind giving up privacy in order to take advantage of the benefits. "If you care about getting discounts or being rewarded for shopping," he explains, "you'll accept having your whereabouts known."

So What Sort of Benefits Actually Work?

Marketing news site Clickz has uncovered strategies that have, so far, proved successful for location-based advertising, both on mobile and elsewhere.

On mobile platforms, they agree with ABI, the clear winner is the reward system.

Specifically, they find that activity-based advertising, which rewards consumers for taking specific actions, has done well. Although Clickz cites examples that have been proven successful on the iPhone, they could easily be successful on other platforms as well, we think, there just haven't been as many mobile applications with which to test this strategy.

Clickz specifically cited two examples of reward-based systems, the first being TV network Bravo's Foursquare promotion which awarded badges to Foursquare users who checked in to venues associated with the network's shows. The other example was wireless charging company Powermat's MyTown promotion involving a sweepstakes. Users could enter to win a Powermat by interacting with the product in the store.

ABI's research report analyzes even more cases studies including clothing company H&M's virtual goods in MyTown, Chili's Foursquare promotion, Sharpie's badges on Brightkite and more.

We've reported on several other such initiatives ourselves, including Shopkick's incentive program, SCVNGR's partnership with shoe company Journeys, NYC-based hyperlocal location/group-buying startup, GroupTabs, travel rewards for frequent travelers from TopGuest, white-labeled geofenced text messasaging service ShopAlerts and many, many others.

Now that app makers and marketers know rewards are the key to success, it's a great time for companies and advertisers alike to experiment with various reward systems, promotions and deals to figure out what types of incentives actually work.

What's worse, for marketers hoping to tap into a diverse and savvy audience of shoppers, diners, and other local consumers, the details on audience make-up are disappointing. According to Forrester, LBS users are 80% male and 70% are aged 19-35.

So should marketers stay away for now until these services mature? Absolutely not. And here's why.

Yes, the audience for Foursquare, Gowalla, MyTown, Brightkite, Loopt and the other smaller players in the location-based services game is young, tech-savvy, educated (70% have a 4-year degree) and predominately male.

But so is the average early adopter of new technology, historically speaking. As Foursquare's co-founder Dennis Crowley explains, we're still in the early days of location-based services. "Go back to Facebook's stats in 2005 or Twitter's stats in 2006, and you'll probably find data that tells a similar story."

And yet, despite the relatively small size of these apps' user bases (Foursquare and Brightkite have around 2 million users, Loopt has 4 million, Booyah's MyTown has 2.5 million, and Gowalla 340,000), these apps attract the ideal customer for marketers to target with mobile coupons, ads and other location-based campaigns. These users are the "influentials," which, in marketing speak, means they're more likely to spread the word about a business, share their opinions and encourage others to join in this new-fangled check-in game.

In fact, the report finds that 38% of these users are more likely than others to have friends and family ask their opinions prior to purchase. They're 14-20% more likely to use their phones for comparison shopping and, in general, they're more likely to research a product or service before purchasing.

In other words, when these folks get a good deal, they know they're getting a good deal. And they'll probably tell someone about it.

Challenges for LBS: Fragmentation & Potential for Big Players to Crush Small Ones

Although LBS apps have the potential to connect marketers to key customers, there are still a number of issues beyond the demographics of the current audience and its size. For one thing, the market is heavily fragmented. Not only are there half a dozen or so "major" players in the check-in business, there are also other location-based apps that focus on different types of experiences. For example, the object-based social network Stickybits allows anyone to tag real-world items with barcoded stickers, while other niche apps like SCVNGR turn checking in into a puzzle-solving game. Although not mentioned in the report, we could add Miso to this list of niche apps as well, as it lets you "check in" to TV and movies you're watching.

Another potential problem for today's LBS applications is the potential for a big player to come in and dominate the market. Google already has location-based services Latitude and Buzz, both which have the potential to increase as the Android market grows. Yahoo has partnered with Nokia on mapping and has acquired various location-based services, too. We also have to point out the elephant in the room, even though Forrester did not: Facebook. If the social network with now half-a-billion users ever formally launches an LBS app or service, it could be game over for everyone else.

Is Forrester Warning Marketers Away from LBS?

The knee-jerk reaction to Forrester's report (as evidenced here in the comments of this AdAge article) is that the research is essentially downplaying the potential of the LBS market. That's not necessarily the case.

Instead, Forrester not only highlights some high-profile partnerships between LBS apps and major brands (Starbucks/Foursquare & Brightkite, NatGeo, USA Today & The Washington Post/Gowalla, Gap/Loopt), it also recommends particular companies take special notice of the potential here.

Companies engaged in event marketing, those with retail storefronts and those whose online tools translate to offline interaction (Craigslist and ZipCar, for example) could all benefit from using this technology, the report recommends.

And while other businesses may not be able to generate a critical mass of volume with LBS-based programs, now is the time to experiment, says Forrester. Male-targeted companies may have better luck than others, but only for the moment. Other marketers may want to wait for demographic and adoption rates to increase and for the "vendor dust to settle," though. While yes, Forrester concludes that, in some cases, "the potential for LBS doesn't match the hype," that statement ends with an important qualifier: "....YET."

"Rather than someone checking into a specific application, we would already know you are there," Cuban explains. That prospect is either incredible or downright scary, depending on how you feel about privacy.

For users of location-based services, particularly the so-called check-in applications like Foursquare, Gowalla, Brightkite, Loopt, MyTown, Latitude and others, the process of registering yourself as present at a given location is still very much a manual one. A user has to pull out their smartphone, launch an app, wait for it to load, then tap a button to check in. Hardly a social activity for what are branded "social networking services."

Those who go through this process are often rewarded for doing so, with tips about the establishment from their friends, like the best entrée to order at a restaurant or which bartender makes the best martini. Sometimes location-based services users even get access to special discounts or coupons. For example, those who become "mayor" of their local Starbucks on Foursquare (a honorary title given to those who check in the most) get discounts on Frappuccinos. Those who check in to clothing store Ann Taylor get discounts on purchases, too. And those who check in using IZEA's WeReward can actually earn cash back.

But for the mainstream user, the idea of checking in hasn't caught on just yet, in part due to privacy concerns and also perhaps because they don't realize the value of doing so. Only a handful of major chains and other big-name businesses are offering tangible rewards, so checking in because of a coupon or special is a decidedly hit-or-miss endeavor at this point.

Despite these potential pitfalls, location-based services are steadily growing. Loopt has 4 million users, Google's Latitude 3 million, Booyah's MyTown and Foursquare over 2 million and Gowalla 340,000. And those user counts are growing fast for some - Foursquare, for example, is adding on average 12,900 new users per day.

Background Check-ins Encourage "Serendipity"

One problem all the location-based companies are trying to address is a way to overcome the manual process involved with performing a check-in. For services like Loopt, the idea has been to take advantage of a smartphone's ability to run processes in the background, a feature just added to the latest iPhone OS software, iOS 4. "The ability to run location-based apps in the background makes serendipity happen... Users will be able to share their location and receive alerts on the phone in their pocket when they're near a friend," said Sam Altman, CEO of Loopt, when the feature went live.

Although that makes the process easier, there are still questions to be answered: How long does background sharing remain on? Do you need to remind people on a regular basis that they're sharing their movements? How often do you do so? Should this be switched on by default?

Passive Check-ins with your Face?

Now it seems check-ins may become even more passive than apps that run in the background if Cuban has his way. All you would have to do is walk into an establishment and your check-in would be registered - yes, via facial recognition software.

Hints of "Minority Report," anyone? Indeed, such software could "see" you, check you in and then offer you personalized advertisements, much like those presented to Tom Cruise's character in the futuristic movie where billboards and holograms knew who you were and what you purchased.

Will that be horrible or helpful, though? After all, recommendation systems on sites like Amazon.com and Netflix already help improve upon your shopping experiences, so why not location-based software?

However, even though such systems are likely to be opt-in, some will find this automated Big Brother type process far too invasive. And others think that it misses the point entirely. Dennis Mink, CEO of location-based aggregator FootFeed, says, "By sharing where you are, what you are doing and thoughts about the experience, it gives you a sense of being connected to the world. This is what motivates people to [use] Twitter, post a status on Facebook or check in at their current location... To think that a video system with facial recognition software can fill the emotional needs of millions of people is quite simply misguided."

On the other hand, Aaron Strout, CMO of Powered, a dedicated social media agency, thinks the approach sounds "quite innovative," but cautions that facial recognition technology may not be able to perform on this level for at least of couple of years.

Today, we're experimenting with a third: the oddly named, but feature-rich "Footfeed."

Footfeed is a universal check-in application for the iPhone (OS 3.1.3 or greater). The app supports the popular location-based services Foursquare, Gowalla and Brightkite as well as the social networking site, Facebook.

In theory, the app lets you check in to multiple services at the same time. From the company's homepage, a real-time feed of recent public check-ins shows that the app, for some, does function as advertised. In practice, however, I had issues with it not checking me in to services I had registered within the app's settings.

Too Bad It's Buggy!

Last night, for example, I checked into L.A. Fitness. I know the location exists in Foursquare because I've used the Foursquare native app to perform check-ins there in the past. However, even though I've associated Foursquare with Footfeed, it only checked me into Gowalla. I had to launch Foursquare separately and perform the check in there myself, defeating the purpose of having a universal app. Afterwards, I checked into a second location, but this time, the app didn't register the check-in on any service, it only registered it with Footfeed itself. On a separate occasion, that same location was registered with Foursquare, but nothing else.

I also had issues with Facebook. Although Facebook is associated with my Footfeed account and shows up in my list of applications on Facebook.com with all the proper permissions, it never posted any check-ins to my Facebook profile. (I'm assuming that's what the integration is for?)

Needless to say, I'm really confused. Why isn't the app checking me to all the services? Isn't that the point?

Features that Work

It's a shame the app didn't work because beyond the check-in issues, there is a lot to like about Footfeed and its accompanying web service. Once registered, you can sign into your account online and see a list of all your check-ins and stats with the various location-based services, including things like badges, mayorshsips, friend counts, pins, stamps, fans, etc. These stats are available within the mobile application too, which is a great feature. The mobile also app includes your history, a friend list, your friends' stream of check-ins, a list of favorite places and more.

On the website, you can scroll back through your check-in history and browse through a huge listing of Footfeed users (although one that's in no particular order and not searchable at present).

While it's great to see the aggregated list of check-ins from your friends within a mobile app, GeoLorean offers this too and the universal check-in functionality is supported by both it and the Web app, Check.in, where the feature works far more consistently.

According to Footfeed's "About Us" page, Twitter, Google Latitude and Whrrl check-ins will be supported soon. I'd recommend that the developers figure out the bugs first, before adding more services and certainly before making you pay for the app, as its iTunes page hints at.

Negativities aside, it's worth noting that your mileage may vary when you try the app. I haven't tested Footfeed extensively using multiple iPhones, multiple OS versions or multiple locales. I've only used the iPhone 4. If you experience other results, let us know in the comments.

I actually do hope that Footfeed can resolve its issues because a speedy universal mobile application would be handy...and it is fast - much faster than the Web app Check.in, for example.

Footfeed is currently free from the iTunes App Store. An Android app is in the works. 

Fifteen-month-old Foursquare is adding 100,000 new users every week, and Facebook has made it clear that location is a feature it is preparing to offer soon. What's the motivation for users to register where they are in the offline world online? We asked some users of these services and found that they had varied and interesting answers.

Of course, location services vary widely in nature. Nick Bicanic's startup EchoEcho, for example, is a very discreet service for letting one friend know where you are at a time, emphasizing extreme ease of use. OK Magazine's new celebrity-stalking location app might represent the other end of the spectrum.

Most people who shared their experiences with us were using one of the big social location apps: Foursquare, Gowalla, Google Latitude or BrightKite. Real-world businesses are starting to make interesting use of these services. (Here's one list of 21 different examples.)

The types of places users check into are somewhat diverse, too, though the stereotype of Foursquare users as youthful bar-hoppers is largely confirmed by the numbers. According to a data visualization by the independent group BitsyBot Labs, bar check-ins on the service beat out check-ins at places of education and parks almost all last week. Bars were about equal with the arts and entertainment category. Food and shopping reign supreme, but on most days travel tops drinking, too.

Those numbers tell you something about aggregate activities, but why do individuals participate in this in the first place? It's emotional, and it's different for different people. Will location apps become far more popular once mobile coupons become ubiquitous, and people can save money by using such services? Maybe, but there are clearly other types of incentives already available.

Serendipity and Connection

San Francisco entrepreneur Pat Diven uses location-based social networks for probably the best-known reason, in the types of circumstances you might expect. He's checked in on Foursquare more than 400 times, including at the bloggers' event WordCamp, more than three times at an Apple store, and at more than 20 different pizza places. His Plancast account, where he records not where he is, but where he will be, indicates that he's the kind of guy who likes both big tech conferences, as well as things like camping in Big Sur and beer and music parties in the countryside.

"I use location for chance meetups with people I know in the city," he said last Friday afternoon via a Twitter client on his phone. "It's worked a few times." Diven also raised a common concern, articulated as a sophisticated social network user might: "Hoping for more granular control soon!" He's a good example of an active person who both exposes a lot of their activity publicly and has entirely private accounts on other services.

Diven exposes enough, though, that I was able to see a lot of information about what he likes to do just by looking around online - I didn't speak to him for this article beyond trading a single tweet. He's been doing this for long enough (his Twitter account is more than three years old) that he's sure to have decided that a certain amount of public exposure was worth it to him.

Cambridge-based experimental tech CEO Shava Nerad is on the other side of the country and has a different take on the use of location apps to connect with other people. She says for her, it's simple. "I have friends who work in coffee shops and we like to spontaneously clump to co-work," she said by iPhone early Saturday evening. "The rest doesn't matter to me."

Nerad's public Foursquare history is much tamer than many people's - though she did once win a badge for checking in after 3 a.m. on a weeknight, so apparently it's not all about working.

Portland, Ore., consultant Mike M. says he uses location services to track people more than to meet them. His son works in emergency medical services, and Mr. M keeps an eye on him using Google's service Latitude, "hoping he stays safe." (I called him Mr. M. just because I don't want to see his kid get in trouble.)

Location apps for tracking people around medical matters? That kind of thing makes many people take pause. Some of the same types of tracking technology are being incorporated into medicine and are in many cases causing a substantial reconsideration of patient privacy.

In the consumer world, it's different. Last week I showed my dental hygienist who else was checked in to the dentist's office on Foursquare at the same time I was, and her first reaction was concern about HIPAA (the federal Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act, which regulates the security and privacy of health-related data). She decided no one could stop the patients themselves from exposing their own location; she just couldn't confirm to me whether or not she actually knew who those people were.

Much more straightforward, in the people-connection department, was my wife's comment left on Facebook last week when she got home and I was gone. I had checked into a coffee shop and pushed the update from Foursquare to Facebook, and she commented "there you are! I was wondering where you went."

Be it for chance or as an exercise in caution, the uses of location services for tracking other people are just beginning to become clear.

For the Win

Many of the popular location-based social networks present themselves as games. They give points to users for going to new or multiple places, then tally the points up against the user's friends. Does that really motivate people to check in? Does it motivate people to go to more or different places?

Apparently, it does. New York City author, social media consultant and mom Tamar Weinberg says, "people disagree with the concept of badges, but I think it's fun to chase after new opportunity & status." Hutch Carpenter, almost Weinberg's exact opposite as an enterprise engineering platform executive and a dad in San Francisco, says he sees it that way too. "I second that," he said of Weinberg's explanation.

That ethos of location-based public achievement may go transgenerational, too. Carpenter checked in on Foursquare at Toy Story 3 this Saturday, said it was his 6-year-old son's first trip to a movie theater, and pushed the update to Twitter.

This gameplay isn't necessarily about narcissism. Virginia-based developer Alex Stone, who says he's made several friends because of Foursquare, says of competing service Gowalla that "[its] quest for items and trip pins has led me to discover some really cool spots in my own small town."

As a Personal History

The thing that surprised me most when I asked people why they use location-based social networks is how many of them say they use it primarily to track their own personal history. It's a lazy diary, people say. I thought, naively, that I was the only one who felt that way.

Some people say they use it to help with their expense tracking on business travels.

Buffalo, NY, Web developer Adrian Roselli told me Friday that he started using BrightKite "so I could post photos in real-time while traveling and associating each with locations on maps." He says he publishes the RSS feed of his check-in history to a map he can view later, to trace his route. That's really geeky, but according to his check-ins, Roselli spent Friday night having dessert with a woman and Saturday morning on a charity bike ride. So apparently, you can push a check-in feed to a map and still maintain some connection to the kinds of things that normal people do. Several people told me they are doing technical things like that with their check-in histories for self-awareness.

When I went to New York with my wife earlier this month, she grew very tired of me pulling out my phone to check in everywhere we went. But once we got home, she admitted it was nice to be able to scroll back through the updates to Facebook I published and remember all the places we had been.

Or, as Palo Alto's Spencer Schoeben told me this weekend, "I love looking back at my check-in history and remembering the awesome things I've done." Schoeben is the 16-year-old founder of one startup company and CEO of another, so he's recording a busy young man's history with those check-ins.

Schoeben has reason to be proud of his accomplishments - and maybe we all do. The one rationale for checking in no one I talked to claimed for themselves - but that one very perceptive person quietly told me was probably more common than not - was showing off. "To non-explicitly brag about your coolness and/or importance, based on where you eat, drink, work, and travel." That makes sense to me. Heck, I'll own it myself, to some degree.

Did I feel a little cool when I checked in at Manhattan's underground Ping-Pong venue and bar called SPiN New York and wrote "Crazy place, ping pong balls flying everywhere, hitting me while I drink beer and blog"? Yeah, I did. Was I aware of what I was doing the next weekend when I checked into two mid-century modern furniture stores in a row? Yes, throw me to the type of piranhas that eat people like me! I was aware of what I was doing.

There are clearly many different reasons people use location-based social networks. Many of us use them for several different reasons ourselves, at different times.

There are, of course, other sides of the story, ranging from the very serious to the somewhat serious. Dan Tynan wrote this weekend at IT World about why you should consider not participating in these kinds of services. Tynan writes a blog called Thank You For Not Sharing, which says it includes "a fair amount of whining." (It's really quite funny.)

Presuming you're fully informed (though that's another matter), then whether these services are for you comes down largely to your circumstances and your attitude. They aren't for everyone. But they are a good experience for some people, as the stories above illustrate. If you've ever wondered why on earth someone would use a service like this - that's why.

So how did it fare? Not bad at all, if I do say so myself.

However, I'm not so old and boring (yet) that I can't see the appeal of these services. In my younger, more active days - before I was tied down to a life of diaper runs and other errands - an app like Brightkite or Foursquare would have been a blast to use. But sadly, I never got to experience those types of services back when they would have been the most fun for me - heck, I don't think any of my college friends even had cell phones. (You kids have it so good, you have no idea).

That being said, I really enjoyed using Check.in. It was incredibly easy to use, always found my location accurately and worked without error or crashes.

My only complaint was that the app was slow at times, even when I had a good signal, although that could be due to the fact that it was still in private beta. Perhaps they haven't thrown enough computing power behind it yet?

Sometimes this slowness, which often occurred during the "magical place matching" screen, was a major issue. When doing drive-by check-ins (a.k.a. "quick stops"), for example, I found myself leaving the venue before the processing was done. Curse you Starbucks drive-thrus and your speedy service! I will never be mayor!

We Need a Place-Matching Database

Another issue, and one that Brightkite has no control over, is the lack of a unified places database, as TechCrunch mentioned earlier this morning. Brightkite is on board with this idea, but the other major players need to agree, too, in order for it to work.

What this means in terms of app usability, though, is that you often have to tell it that Location X on this service is the same as Location Y on that service. Check.in, for what it's worth, walks you through this process with ease, but it can slow down check-in time even further.

In other words, if you feel stupid "checking in" to places and try to get it over with quickly before you have to explain yourself to your non-early-adopter friends and family, Check.in won't solve that problem - it makes it worse.

Solid, Well-Built App

Outside of these inconveniences, neither of which are necessarily Brightkite's problem, I can report that Check.in is a solid, well-built app. As you check in to the various services via Check.in, the app also returns relevant data, new mayorships, points, etc.

The app has also been improved during the beta period with better, tighter privacy controls, and sharing settings for posting to Twitter and Facebook.

Insights and Future Plans

The Brightkite team shared a few early insights from their beta trials, which involved 6,000 users and 135,000 check-ins. The average user checked in 20 times, more than 2.3 million places were queried and most users checked in to two or three services at once. Friday is the busiest day for check-ins and Sunday is the quietest.

The team now wants your feedback as to what needs to be added or improved next. They've asked Yelp to open up its API, but so far the company has said no. We suggest it consider adding another major LBS player, Loopt. According to the Brightkite blog, it appears that service is also considering Check.in integration into Brightkite's native apps, a decision that could easily make Brightkite the top LBS-based app across multiple platforms.

As an attendee at SXSW, it seemed like Foursquare and Gowalla were the most used. Brightkite seemed to drop off the radar of SXSW attendees, but perhaps that was because Foursquare and Gowalla had the most press attention at that time. Whatever the case, it was an inconclusive result at SXSW and there was a sense that none of the 3 leading location-based mobile apps 'won' that battle. It's now a month later, so we thought we'd poll you again to see which - if any - of these apps you use regularly now.

See also:

• Two-Thirds of iPhone Users Now Use Location-Based Services at Least Once a Week
• Top 10 Mobile Trends of 2010, Part 2: Apps, Apps, Apps

Join us at the ReadWriteWeb Mobile Summit on May 7, in Mountain View, CA, to discuss location-based apps and other hot topics in Mobile. If you're in town for the Web 2.0 Expo that week, our Mobile Summit is the day after. We'd love to see you there! Register here.

From what we can tell, the folks over at Brightkite have the solution with Check.in, but have yet to release it to the achey-thumbed, smart-phoned masses.

"Check.in takes the hassle out of checking in on multiple services," the page reads. And at the bottom, we're told that the service is "made by Martin May, Brady Becker, and Jordan Harband of Brightkite after severe check-in fatigue."

When you take a closer look at the sole image on the page, which depicts a Check.in app on both iPhone and Android, we can see that the service appears to handle check-ins for Foursquare, Gowalla and Brightkite, and we would assume others are on the way. But we have to wonder how it would check in to Gowalla, as the company's API is currently read-only.

Check.in would be the first of its kind in the market and would surely co-opt a large amount of traffic and make the "severe check-in fatigue" that much more manageable.

When we first wrote about this at the beginning of the month, the only response we received was "no comment". We asked again today, but have yet to receive any comment. We've also asked the folks over at Gowalla and they had this to say:

"We currently do not allow write access to our API. For now we're excited to see creative use of the read API while we continue to polish our own native clients."

If this service is in the pipeline to be released soon, it looks like Gowalla would not be included in the check-in service and that would be a shame. It's only Friday and there are a number of days left to SXSW Interactive, AKA "Nerdfest 2010", but wouldn't it be that much more enjoyable if you didn't have to spend the first 10 minutes any time you arrived somewhere new checking in?

With that said, we have to wonder how much we would lose out on the features now offered by these services. Will Check.in also offer tips, photos, check-in commenting and all of that or will it just let us broadcast our location? For now, we'll just have to wonder, but either way, fear not, a solution looks to be on the way.

We're excited about location too; see our enthusiastic write-ups What Twitter's Geolocation API Makes Possible and The Era of Location as Platform Has Arrived. But it's getting a little ridiculous. We offer below a few thoughts to consider about all this location madness.

Imagine the Future, It's Going to Be Different

If location based services ever become popular with the mainstream, every urban area might end up looking like the Foursquare map of downtown Austin this weekend. That means services are going to have to come up with creative and interesting new ways to make that data usable day-to-day and not overwhelming.

Likewise, when you think about the future, imagine Facebook being a player in this market, because they are going to be soon. It's possible that Facebook and Twitter could be where all these other services meet-up. Brightkite has different features than BlockChalk but we can see what our friends are doing across any of these apps on Facebook, perhaps. And Facebook is where your mom checks-in, if she's not an early adopter.

Finally, will location tracking be persistent? Loopt right now uses mobile carrier tie-ins to track your location constantly and expose it to a circle of trusted friends. Is that something that all services will enable in the future? Gowalla CEO Josh Williams told us "no way" does he think that will be the dominant model, but Adam Duvander, author of the forthcoming book Mapscripting 101, says he agrees with Loopt: that the value in persistent location tracking will be so compelling that everyone will end up going for it in the end, once proper privacy settings are figured out.

What do you think, do you think persistent location tracking is the future of location based services?

These are some of the things I'm thinking about location this week.

]]> Discuss]]> http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/location_analysis_sxsw.php http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/location_analysis_sxsw.php Location Thu, 11 Mar 2010 17:00:52 -0800 Marshall Kirkpatrick Location based social network Brightkite plans to launch a universal check-in API that will let users update their information on competing services like Gowalla, Foursquare and others later this month at South by Southwest, we believe.

In a poll we ran last night about competing location networks, Mark Krynsky, founder of Lifestreamblog and CheckInBlog, left the following comment: "I'd like to see a a multi-checkin service make its appearance at SXSW that would allow me to check into all 3 mentioned in the poll (more if possible) at once.

Think Ping.fm for checkin services." Brightkite co-founder Martin May replied: "working on exactly that."

]]> Brightkite executives declined to share any further details before they unveil whatever it is that they are working on, but there are additional reasons to believe that we'll see a cross-system check-in tool from the company later this month. Brightkite API email list members were warned last month that major changes to the company's development platform were coming at a time that roughly corresponds with SXSW. TechCrunch coverage of the company's surprisingly high user numbers and local advertising deals from a week ago also includes brief mention of something coming around SXSW time.

A universal check-in system is the next logical step for location based social networks. It's just no fun to use one service but give up the ability to see where your friends on other networks are. Siloed social networks end up competing not on the quality of their services, but on the number of your friends they have locked-in to their network in particular. Setting users free through a universal, interoperable check-in would be a bold move. It will be interesting to see how Brightkite tries to do it and how its competitors respond. (We've got inquiries in asking a few of them.)

Hopefully a universal check-in system will be good for all players in the field. That was the vision of Yahoo's FireEagle, which you don't hear a lot about these days.

Brightkite says it has 2 million active monthly users and it was the clear winner in last night's ReadWriteWeb poll asking which location service people would use at SXSW. But it gets far less media hype these days than Foursquare and Gowalla and admittedly approximate web traffic services don't show Brightkite in the lead at all.

Either way, offering up a way to read from and write across multiple location based social networks would be absolutely fabulous. Our fingers are crossed that this is what we'll see from Brightkite in a few weeks and that it will be good.

Update: Foursquare founder Dennis Crowley says this is news to him and a reader in comments points out that Gowalla's API is read-only, making a universal check-in impossible. Gowalla has said it is working on a write capable version of its API, though. Time will tell what's going on! If not Brightkite, then somebody needs to build a universal check-in system ASAP. Google Buzz may be a good place to look for this as well, see How Google Buzz is Disruptive: Open Data Standards. Our fingers remain crossed.

]]> Discuss]]> http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/brightkite_universal_check-in_foursquare_gowalla.php http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/brightkite_universal_check-in_foursquare_gowalla.php News Mon, 01 Mar 2010 13:25:18 -0800 Marshall Kirkpatrick Location-based social network Brightkite announced this morning that it has added what it calls the first mobile Augmented Reality advertising for U.S. markets to its AR layer in the Layar augmented reality browser. Augmented Reality (AR) is a class of technologies that place data from the web on top of a camera view of the physical world. Layar is a browser for a wide variety of AR data layers, from real-estate listings to government data to messages posted to networks like Brightkite. It is available for Android phones and was available on the iPhone until it was withdrawn from the marketplace last week due to excessive crashes.

The Brightkite ads appear to be just for electronics retailer BestBuy so far, and are displayed as unique markers in your field of view when pointed towards one of the stores.

]]> Big round circles have been added to Brightkite camera-view annotations, designating the location of nearby BestBuy stores. The circles join the clearly different annotations for text messages and photos posted by nearby users. The ads are relatively unobtrusive for now.

These ads appear in all search results pages, whether they are relevant or not. For example, no one has posted on Brightkite about "pizza" within miles of me for the last three days, but a search for pizza displays a number of search results on my phone's radar. It turns out those are the BestBuys in my area. The same results appear in searches for "love" and "flatulence" - it's all BestBuy. If advertising proliferates on platforms like this then it's going to have to become contextual.

These are the early days in mobile Augmented Reality advertising, but the field is expected to be big. AR has been become increasingly common in recent months as a gimmick in print ads that can be held up to a webcam to display a 3D image, but we're unaware of previous experiments like what Brightkite is doing on Layar.

Is the advertising industry excited about mobile AR advertising? Blake Robinson, director of research and measurement at social media marketing firm Attention, says he is. "If the question is whether or not money will be pumped into mobile AR advertising," he says,"I'd say it's not a question of if, but when - and I'd say soon.

"For the first time in a long time local businesses could be given opportunities by advertisers to reach not just potential patrons but people who are literally at their doorsteps. There is a lot of potential for good here, a lot of potential for irritation too, but I'm more excited than daunted."

Will consumers find the ads more useful than invasive? That's an age-old question in the relationship between advertisers and consumers.

]]> Discuss]]> http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/mobile_advertising_augmented_reality.php http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/mobile_advertising_augmented_reality.php Advertising Mon, 21 Dec 2009 09:35:57 -0800 Marshall Kirkpatrick