ReadWriteWeb

Today American Express and Federated Media announced a free iPhone app, Social Currency, built on the Foursquare platform. The app lets users track things they want to buy, upload photos of purchases and comment on what their friends do, pushing the updates to Twitter and Foursquare.

The app was launched to complement Currency, a website that features financial advice for young people. The app adds a social and gaming component to the site.

Geocaching, the game of finding objects hidden around the world using a GPS device, is believed to have 5 million participants worldwide, according to leading commercial portal Geocaching.com. That company released a new geocaching app for Android this morning, with a price tag of $9.99.

With more than 5 million participants, Geocaching.com calls the practice "the most popular location-based game on Earth." That's a number not for one particular company, but an estimate of all the geocaching participants across different platforms. Still, the game is typically thought of as a pretty nerdy pass-time, but it remains twice as big as the much hyped location startup Foursquare. Are we Foursquare fans missing out on something?

Foursquare has quietly added a new feature to its website this afternoon that you won't want to miss: a new "add to my foursquare" button that can be embedded on any website.

If you own a business or publish a web page about any real-world location, this very simple button will allow visitors to your website to add going to your location as a "to-do" item and receive a push-notification to their phones whenever they check-in anywhere nearby. This small button could deliver a substantial part of the promise of Foursquare - tying together our discoveries online with our experiences offline.

According to a current headline on TechMeme, McDonalds saw a 33% increase in foot traffic to its stores when it ran a promotion during Foursquare Day earlier this year. At that time, the fast food chain offered users who checked into McDonald's a chance to win $5 and $10 gift cards. On the Econsultancy blog, Meghan Keane reports that McDonald's head of social media Rick Wion claims that, "with this one little effort [$1000 in gift cards], we were able to get a 33% increase in foot traffic to the stores." These numbers, however, simply don't add up.

Advertisers have long talked about the mystical possibilities of using real-time location data to target customers. The technology existed; most cell phones have a GPS receiver in case of emergency. But real-time location data was off-limits to advertisers until Web-centric phones introduced people to the concept of sharing their location in exchange for utility. Soon, along came apps like Foursquare and Gowalla, which essentially trick users into sharing their real-time location with advertisers. Suddenly, location-aware marketing is red hot.

"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."

Location-based mobile applications, also now being called "check-in services" to differentiate themselves from other geo-aware apps like Google Maps, are the hottest new social applications on the mobile scene today. The lineup includes game-based applications like Foursquare and MyTown, which each provide points, credits and/or badges for "checking in" (registering your physical presence) with a particular venue. There are also dedicated shopping-related check-in services like Shopkick, which rewards retail customers with discounts and deals for patronizing select establishments.

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.

When social networking behemoth Facebook launched its foray into the location game with Places, some declared that apps like Foursquare and Gowalla would be rendered obsolete. The result, so far, has been quite the contrary, as the megaphone of Facebook has helped spread the word about location apps to the laypeople. Today, the mobile location app market got another big boost as iTunes launched "On the Grid," (iTunes Link) a special showcase featuring geosocial iOS apps on the front page of the App Store.

SCVNGR, a Google Ventures backed mobile location startup, will become one of the first few trusted partners to be allowed to write updates to Facebook through the Places API today. The company says it has already brought its game and challenge-based service to more than 600 companies, museums, universities, conferences and other organizations, including Princeton, MIT, The Smithsonian National Zoo, the City of Philadelphia and the U.S. Navy. It plans a major new push with free promotion of local businesses in major cities throughout the US starting next month.

"It was only a matter of time before Facebook owned social networking plus location, through something like the check-in," 21 year old founder Seth Priebatsch said by phone Thursday. "That's why we've been focused on being the game layer. Will they give better ranking [in the Newsfeed exposure algorithm] to interesting, premium content in location? We expect to get a nice lift for our challenge stories. Foursquare and Gowalla are now basically just reproductions of Facebook's own functionality."

Earlier this week we provided a few tips for marketing your startup on the cheap, and a large part of that involves managing your brand's social media presence. Well that's all fine and dandy until you realize that there are dozens of social networks on the Web and actually managing them can be quite a daunting task for a small business on a budget. Enter Sprout Social, which does for social media what Zendesk does for support tickets, providing a rich Web-based dashboard for monitoring and management.

Ever since the first hushed rumors of Facebook getting into the location game, everyone has been looking to pioneering services like Foursquare, wondering what they thought and what would become of them in the face of such a social networking Goliath.

Today, Foursquare CEO Dennis Crowley cast the first stone, calling Facebook Places "not that great or interesting" and saying that overall "it's a pretty boring service". But are virtual badges really worth more than friends?