ReadWriteWeb

The tech world has gone geo-loco for geo-locational apps. As per our article entitled Location is Hot: Foursquare Traffic Up 3X in 2 Months, users are flocking to location-based services in the hopes of literally leaving their mark on the world. While many are just discovering services like Foursquare, Gowalla and Latitude, others are making them into viable business platforms. Nevertheless, a recent forum posts suggests Apple may restrict geo-locational ads - an act that would be a huge hindrance for those looking to monetize the iPhone.

It's no secret that Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg is interested in scooping up more startups in order to bring their talent on board. From Firefox creator Blake Ross's Parakey (acquired in 2007) through Gmail creator Paul Buchheit's FriendFeed (acquired in 2009), Facebook has made some very high-profile talent acquisitions already.

This Fall, Zuckerberg got early access to his old friend Adam D'Angelo's new question and answer site Quora and used it to ask: "What startups would be good talent acquisitions for Facebook?"

Business review service Yelp will update its mobile apps soon to include a feature called "check-ins," a feature similar to one that several smaller location-based social networks have built their businesses around. This according to several other blogs that were given early access to the feature - blogs that, co-incidentally, are less likely to mention complaints about Yelp, like that it is hated by many business owners, is believed by some to be full of extortionists, and is believed by many to be filled with self-absorbed, chronically snide hipsters.

Those common criticisms aside, Yelp is pretty awesome and the addition of check-ins could make it even more awesome still. Or it could be really annoying. It's hard to say for sure, but it's definitely going to be a big deal.

If you're like many of us, you're home for the holidays. Rather than complaining about the springs in the pullout couch or watching endless television reruns, consider rediscovering your hometown. Featured on today's Flickr blog, Noticings is a location-based game similar to Foursquare that forces you to discover new gems in your old haunts.

With the rapid growth of services like Foursquare, Gowalla and Brightkite, location-based mobile social networks seem to be a dime a dozen these days, but they're only fun and useful if your friends are using it, too.

Each time that I've tried one of these services, I find myself trying to convince my friends to use it so that I can have meaningful contacts to keep track of. Some of them don't have the right phone, or are worried about blasting out their GPS coordinates to the world.

Social networking travel site Dopplr has apparently been acquired by Nokia for somewhere between $15-22 million dollars. A year ago ReadWriteWeb named Dopplr one of the Top 10 International Products of 2008 and it looks like the community's social features have garnered significant interest from investors. According to TechCrunch, just as the company was about to close an additional funding round, Nokia moved in for the acquisition.