ReadWriteWeb

If this week's Where 2.0 conference is proof of anything, it's that developers are excited about creating location aware mobile apps. One of the biggest barriers to creating a place-aware app, however, is getting the ball rolling - you need place data.

Place and location, though hand-in-hand, are two different things and SimpleGeo, a geolocation data storage and platform service, announced this week that it has put data for more than 20 million places into the public domain to make it easier than ever for developers to create location-aware applications.

Think about your average, smartphone-enabled visit to a new restaurant: You sit down, take a gander at the menu and quickly pull out your phone to look up the latest Foursquare tips and Yelp reviews. Some are novels of glowing hyperbole while others lament the irritable waitress and denounce the spot as the diner on the seventh level of hell. Either way, you often find yourself overwhelmed and more confused than when you started out.

Loopt, the mobile location tracking app and social network, announced today a new feature called Loopt Qs, "a fun, really social way to get bite-sized insider info and share your own opinions about a local place."

Whether it's PleaseRobMe, the site that aggregated people's publicly-shared check-ins, or Creepy, the app that aggregates public check-ins and photos, location-based services hit on a nerve. But what if they could be used to show us personalized crime data about the places we already go?

The Lincoln Social Computing Research Centre has turned the relationship between LBS apps and safety on its head with a mashup called Fearsquare. Fearsquare uses public data to show Foursquare users in the U.K. how many crimes have been committed in the places they check in and is part of a study looking at how this sort of personalized data could change user behavior.

Early last year, "checking in" was the cool new craze. No visit to your favorite tech news site could be had without getting buried in an avalanche of articles about Foursquare, Gowalla, Loopt, BriteKite or a myriad other startups. The big guys quickly followed suit: Yelp introduced "Check-Ins" while Facebook launched "Places" and most recently, Google Latitude updated to incorporate check-ins and check-outs. But here's the thing: the trends aren't actually that good.

Let's look at Foursquare and Facebook. First, there's no doubt Foursquare is throwing off some impressive numbers (e.g. the company's recent announcement of 8.5 million users). It typically announces total, rather than active, users and that number is roughly growing linearly at present. Total users, by definition, of course, only goes up - yet according to compete.com, Web traffic has declined for five consecutive months, amounting to a 50% reduction in traffic over that period. And while traffic isn't the best indicator of usage, Web visits should be just as likely now as five months ago, and it's certainly not a positive sign of rapid growth in usage.

If you've ever thrown a party and invited all your friends on Facebook, then you're well aware: RSVPs mean nothing. If you're on the other end of things and you want to know whether a party's happening or a dud - again, RSVPs mean nothing. Today, Facebook updated its iPhone app, adding two new features - the ability to check in to events and a map for seeing where all your friends are checked in.

Now, if you're wondering if that party's happening or not, you might be able to just look and see if your friends have checked in there. Of course, that all depends on whether or not Facebook can really bring location to a critical mass of popularity. While that still seems to be a big "if," this update is certainly a push in that direction.

You might want to file this under the "perhaps this was obvious, but we needed another app to show us" category, but if you check in, Tweet your location and otherwise publicly broadcast your GPS coordinates for all the world to see on the Internet, other people can see where you are.

Creepy is a desktop app for Windows and Linux and it's a stalker's dream come true. The big question, though, is should you stop sharing? And is it really all that creepy?

Last night, an app called Color hit the app stores for both iOS and Android. It made a big splash for a number of reasons, not the least of which being its $41 million prelaunch funding. It has all-star founders who have a impressive track records. It launched days after, instead of before, uber tech conference SXSW. Unfortunately for the company, the app can offer a terrible experience for first-time users and appear absolutely useless to those outside of a densely packed, techie mecca like San Francisco or New York.

Let's put all that aside for a moment, however, and look at how Color works, what it does, and why it could redefine mobile, location, and online social interaction. We took some time to talk with Color CEO Bill Nguyen this afternoon and asked him about the tech behind the most talked about app this side of SXSW and here's what he had to say.

With SXSW well under way in Austin, Texas, the servers behind apps like Beluga, GroupMe, Kik and FastSociety must be working overtime. After all, people like talking to their friends, right?

In this same batch of apps, we've seen another phenomenon, though - apps that make it quicker an easier to talk to people you don't know - and we have one big question: Do people really want to talk to strangers?

The last 10 years have been called the era of Web 2.0, a term used to describe a new type of online experience, wherein a user could be both author and audience. That decade, said SCVNGR CEO Seth Priebatsch today in his opening keynote at the SXSW conference, was the decade of social. 

That decade, however, has been won, said Priebatsch. Facebook has come away as the clear leader and now, a new decade is upon us - the decade of games. These are not children's games, however. These are games that could change the world.

Until now, Ushahidi has been most known as a service for reporting location during times of crisis. From its use during the earthquake in Haiti to, most recently, the revolution in Egypt and Libya, the service has been used to help humanitarian workers quickly report location using SMS technology. Today, the company has taken a bit of a turn with the release of its open-source check-in service.

Now, anyone with a bit of PHP knowledge and a server can create a Foursquare, Gowalla, Facebook Places or check-in service of their own and keep their location data out of the hands of the public and corporate alike.