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Over the past few months, Facebook has come out with what two great features - Places and redesigned Groups. The only problem, however, is Places really only appears on the iPhone app and mobile website, while Groups can only be accessed from the full, non-mobile site. The two features, however, would work together perfectly, hence, Mappr.

Mappr brings two of Facebook's best recent additions together, allowing you to check-in without sharing it with everyone on Facebook - exactly what groups were made for.

Although TweetDeck is saying it's "been a crazy couple months," the wait is finally over and today the company is taking TweetDeck for Android out of beta and releasing it into the Android Market.

TweetDeck for Android will handle more than Twitter, bringing the ability to post and receive updates from Facebook, Buzz and Foursquare as well.

Every now and then a product comes along - either from a startup or as a project within a larger company - that seems to meet a worthy need but just doesn't find its legs. Sometimes great ideas are pushed on us too quickly, or are ahead of their time, and other products capitalize on this market months and years down the road. As senior associate Andrew Parker pointed out Wednesday on his blog The Gong Show, this is precisely what happened with the Q&A service boom we see flourishing today.

Although the emphasis of much location-based technology has been on its mobile implementation - the ability to stay updated on whereabouts when you're out-and-about - there's still a place for desktop uses.

And with that in mind, Google has updated Google Latitude so that you can both see where your friends are as well as share your own location.

Location-based network Foursquare was offline yesterday for about 11 hours, which was it admits "unacceptably long." The support team has just updated the company blog with an apology and an explanation, aptly titled "So, That Was a Bummer."

And indeed it was, not only for those of us who regularly check in via Foursquare, but for the other third-party tools that utilize the Foursquare API.

Benjamin Franklin once said that beer is proof God loves us and wants us to be happy. But as a self-described beer snob, I admit I'm pretty unhappy when I end up at a bar that doesn't serve what I consider to be a decent brew.

Enter Beerby. Pronounced like "nearby," Beerby is a mobile app (available for both iPhone and Android) that allows you to check in and rate your beer. The app boasts a database of over 40,000 beers, including my favorite locally-brewed IPA. You can add beers that aren't listed yet to help build out the database, as well as leave comments and reviews about the beers you've sampled.

You probably hear about Foursquare all the time, we certainly write about it a lot here on ReadWriteWeb, but did you know that there are many other things going on in the world of location and mapping? It's a red-hot sector, producing innovative new technologies and use-cases every day.

Where can you learn about all this geo-creativity? Here at ReadWriteWeb, we've come up with a system for efficiently discovering a large number of the top blogs on any subject - and we track the top stories in Geolocation closely. We've decided to open up a little bit of our research and share with you our list of the Top Blogs in Geolocation This Week. Read on to find out which top 10 blogs are writing the hottest stuff now and see all 300 of the blogs we're tracking.

Earlier this summer, we posed the question of whether or not native mobile applications would eventually be made obsolete by the mobile Web. Many agreed that the power of the mobile Web and cloud over native apps may be an inevitability, but according to a survey released today, four out of five app developers say their customers prefer a native experience. With this demand from customers, which features are they looking for most in a mobile experience? Here are some results from the survey that may surprise you.

Dennis Crowley, co-founder of location based social network Foursquare, told attendees of the Picnic conference in Amsterdam today that the company has built a feature that recommends new locations users ought to visit, based on their past activity, their to-do lists and what's popular at the moment. The system is being tested internally by Foursquare staff and Crowley hopes that Foursquare user data will be used by outside developers to build even more kinds of recommendation services. Recommendations, generally, are like searches you hadn't thought yet to perform - in Foursquare they could be a great way to foster new experiences for users and additional activity for businesses.

Crowley's talk was first reported by watchdog blog About Foursquare, where a video of the 20 minute presentation from Picnic can be found.

The hyperlocal social networking app DeHood launched in May for iPhone, and it's got some users totally hooked. The app lets you check-in and communicate with people in your neighborhood and neighborhoods in other cities and is designed for "real-time interaction between families, friends and neighbors."

Another way to say it: DeHood is similar to Foursquare but new updates make it more like the popular mobile social game MyTown. A cool app, yes, but a major location player - probably not.