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.

When it comes to location, an app can use any number of signals, from triangulating with WiFi signals to using the in-phone GPS, to determine the device's exact coordinates. But coordinates are just numbers that relate to a point on a map. When we check in to a place on Foursquare, we don't check in to GPS coordinates, we check in to the coffee shop or the baseball stadium. How does Foursquare do this? It takes our coordinates and relates them to place data. Place data can involve a number of different data points, but at its most simple level, place data attaches a name to geographic coordinates. It can go well beyond that, however, including coordinates to define a place's shape and size, the zip code, the city, state and county that place is located within, and so on.

With this week's announcement, SimpleGeo is saying that the data for nearly 20 million places that it owns are now available, to use freely, under the Creative Commons Zero, or "No Copyright," license.

"Developers want to do a multitude of different things with data," explained Galligan. "There is a future we want to get to when facts are free. We're trying to force that hand a bit."

Galligan acknowledged that some of this data, which is often crowdsourced from multiple sources a la OpenStreetMaps, isn't as good as propriety data quite yet, but it's on its way.

Joe Francia, editor in chief of Directions Media, acknowledged the effect this move could have, but also looked to data quality as the primary weakness.

"Certainly, 'free data' under CC0 shakes up the business model of those who for years have invested in collecting data under a proprietary (read expensive) model," said Francia. "What remains to be seen is if their own sourced data can be maintained and updated in a timely manner. People want good data, regardless."

Nonetheless, a 20-million-strong set of place data could be a great jumping off point for any developer who wants to get into creating place-aware applications without being beholden to the terms of service of companies like Facebook or Foursquare. Galligan encourages developers in his blog post to "take our data, use it, make it your own, and make it better."

Today, he told us simply, that "the developer needs to have the freedom to do whatever the heck they want."

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."

Loopt announced the new feature today on stage at the location-centric Where 2.0 conference. Loopt Qs offers real-time answers to common questions about locations around you - venues, restaurants, bars, and other locations. Is there a long line? What's the best happy hour special here? Is the WiFi fast enough to work?

"Most of the time, reviews are about a place you're really excited about or someplace that really frustrated you," explains the company in a demo video. "The reality is, most places are worth going to. [...] By asking super specific questions that are quick and easy to answer, we capture a lot of the information that gets lost in the shuffle and the fact that it's constantly being updated in real-time makes it sort of a radar for your city."

We've seen this similar functionality in another app called Localmind, which debuted at this year's SXSW conference. With Localmind, users who check in to locations using an LBS service like Foursquare sign up to receive questions about those places. Other Localmind users can then see that there is someone checked-in and ask them a question. It's a one-on-one interaction.

Loopt Qs differs primarily in that it takes a collection of answers from many users and presents them in a graph, giving a simple, quick aggregate of answers. Are portions at this restaurant tiny, just right, or really large? Why take just one answer (potentially from a very large, hungry individual) when you can look at a bar graph of answers and see the most popular answer? This is Loopt's approach with Qs.

Loopt Qs will go live "very soon," with San Franciscans getting first crack and other cities following. If you download the latest version now, the app will notify you when the new feature goes live.

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.

After authorizing Foursquare, Fearsquare makes the comparison and shows you how many instances of robbery, violent crime and "antisocial crime" have occurred in the vicinity. They can then see how they rank on a leaderboard of users and "FearPoints."

"We are interested in how this information affects peoples' fear of crime and in whether peoples perceptions of how much crime they are exposed to on a daily basis reflects the reality," the site explains. "We are also interested in whether data represented in this manner is found to be useful by participants."

What do you think - would crime data for all of the locations you visit (and check in to) change where you go? If you found out that the restaurant across town was near several robberies and violent crimes, would you reconsider? Or are numbers not enough? Does what you see around you and your judgement override the data, or vice versa?

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.

In July 2010, Foursquare had 2 million users performing 1 million check-ins per day. By the end of the year, that number had risen to 5 million users performing 2 million check-ins per day. Impressive growth, yet this means check-ins per user declined from 0.5 per person to 0.4. It also suggests that many of those five million users aren't active.

The trend for Facebook Places is even worse. Facebook had at least 30 million members check in at least once in a shorter time frame as a newer service with a larger built in user base. Yet Facebook Places offers even less value than a Foursquare check-in. There are no points to win and no discovery element like tips; it's just a flat statement that, "I am at Starbucks." As a result, early indications are that Facebook check-ins strongly lag Foursquare check-ins.

The other day, I checked in for lunch at the Ace Hotel in New York City, an epicenter of the digital elite, and, according the Foursquare, the single most checked-into hotel in the world. The place was packed and I could barely get through the door, much less find a place to sit down. Yet, over the course of my two-hour stay, only three other people checked in.

Why Check-ins Are Going to Falter

In 2011 check-ins are going to go the way of the eight-track tape and disappear. You probably already see this happening. How many of your friends are consistently checking in and broadcasting? How many "I just ousted Fred as the mayor of Starbucks" messages do you see in your stream? Across my network - a large and tech-savvy network - I see less than 1% of people checking in on any service, and the trend is down. Some people are undoubtedly checking in privately, but that has major (negative) implications for how a service can spread.

Both Yelp and Facebook have the advantage of huge audiences who visit the services with a clear purpose. People are on Facebook to socialize, and on Yelp looking for a great restaurant. Check-in services aren't going to replicate this scale or focus of audience in the short run, making it hard to make check-ins a mainstream activity. A number of check-in services have effectively already thrown in the towel; BriteKite abandoned its check-ins entirely and Gowalla integrated itself with Facebook and Foursquare check-ins.

All of this doesn't mean, however, that Gowalla, Foursquare, MyTown, Loopt and all the services with check-ins at their core are necessarily going out of business. It does mean they need to find a way to deliver deep value to people beyond the check-in. And unless Facebook and Google provide more value than they currently do, their check-in services will languish as well.

Let's take a look at why check-ins are going to falter and then explore some areas for delivery of deep, lasting value.

Why do people check in? Why should they?

• Finding people near you, a.k.a. serendipity: When your friends happen to be at the same location, it's like magic. Especially useful at conferences, this is check-ins at their best.
• Points and the hoped-for rewards: Whether it is rewards on SCVNGR or deals on Foursquare, people hope to get a discount: a free appetizer, a dollar off coffee. These deals are in their very early stages on location-based services.
• To remember things: In new cities or new venues, I'll often check in (privately) just to remember the place I went. Marshall Kirkpatrick has discussed this use case as well.
• Personal branding: While most people wouldn't use this term, it is what's going on. People are creating a personal online identity for themselves, showcasing who they are by telling everyone what they're doing. (Less charitably: they're bragging, and I'm just as guilty of it as most).

Here's why none of these are going to lead to significant growth for the LBS players.

• The serendipity factor is very much a creature of big cities, certain demographic segments, and New York in particular. If you're in New York, where all your friends are within 10 blocks of you and can quickly get from one location to the next, this is actually awesome. But it's not so hot in big cities like Los Angeles that are too spread out for these serendipitous moments to happen.
• Games are fun for about two weeks, but most don't have staying power. Like a lot of folks, I really dig Call of Duty: Black Ops, but I can only kill so many zombies before it's time to do something else. Games are a novelty and have a very finite shelf life. So long as check-ins are "just a game", they'll be subject to the short life cycle of a game.
• Remembering things holds promise of long-term value; a digital memory bank of places I've been could be really handy. It's just not clear that most people really need it. Unless you spend all your time traveling and going new places, there's just not that much to remember.
• Personal branding is most common amongst the digital elite - the bloggers, social media mavens, tech execs (ok, I plead guilty). Outside a niche set of people who want the personal branding (or ego boost) of the check-in, most people not only don't want to check-in, but they don't know why they should. Most women I talk to are creeped out by broadcasting their location.

Photo by KecMec

How do check-in services go mainstream?

Today, check-ins are mostly the purview of the tech savvy. What would drive the general population to engage on a sustained basis?

1. Socializing. If I see my friends doing it consistently, I might do so as well. Yet (at least on Foursquare), more and more people are checking in privately, choking off a key viral loop. Finding a way to socialize where you are or where you'll be in a way that isn't simply annoying, and has the right privacy model, is key.

2. Deals. If I can regularly and repeatedly get some kind of economic value from checking in, I'll probably continue to do so. But there are big challenges for location-based deals. Groupon has a reach to local businesses (through their sales force) that far outstrips anyone except possibly Google or Facebook. A lot of businesses have broken their pick trying to sell direct to hyperlocal businesses at national scale. The deals also have to be substantive enough to change behavior.

   The power and the limitation of check-ins is that they're after the fact. It's powerful because you, the system and the local merchant know exactly where you are, in the moment. The downside is that check-ins don't really help you decide anything.

   If I'm a Dunkin' Donuts zealot, for instance, I'm probably not going to change my behavior and go to a Starbucks just to save $1. Location-based deals reward decisions already made. If I'm already at Starbucks, why do they want to offer me a deal? It may reward behavior, but doesn't incentivize it.

   Having to be on-location to get a deal limits the reach of a deal, and doesn't drive foot traffic. I just got the world's best Groupon (for a book lover like me): $10 off $20 at Barnes & Noble. This is going to drive me into a store. But I can't find that deal on Facebook or Foursquare because I'm not anywhere near a store right now! The brilliance of Groupon is surfacing the deal before you've made a decision, and generally only costs the business money when it has product additional foot traffic to the store.

3. Photos. Photos being shared in the moment by location could tap into one of the key early drivers of Facebook growth photo sharing, and seeing what you're friends are up to. A photo is way more powerful than a cryptic Twitter post about a check-in. Foursquare's new photo capability will be interesting to watch. But, with Facebook I can already share photos in the moment and don't really need Places to do that.

4. Discovery. The power and the limitation of check-ins is that they're after the fact. It's powerful because you, the system and the local merchant know exactly where you are, in the moment. The downside is that check-ins don't really help you decide anything - they simply recognize and broadcast a decision you've already made. If you're trying to decide where to eat or what concert to go to, a check-in doesn't help. If you are an advertiser trying to influence behavior, you want your message presented before the decision is made, not after, which is when the check-in occurs.

   The larger check-in services have yet to empower real discovery. But if Foursquare's app was encouraging me to broadcast where I will be checking in this weekend, or showing me which sushi spots had the most check-ins, that could be extraordinarily powerful. But they've not really done that yet.

   Facebook Places is even more limited. Have you ever tried to find a "Place" in Facebook? The mobile apps will let you broadcast your location and not much else - there's no way to explore or find new locations or get recommendations from your friends. Nor does Facebook Places give you a way to let your friends know what you will be doing, only where you are now. It is all after the fact.

In 2011, a service that's just about check-ins is going to struggle (best case) or die (worst case). Those that succeed need to find a stronger motivation than badges and self-branding to thrive. That might come in the form of coupons and discounts, but that will run into trouble with the likes of Groupon and Facebook, both of which have far larger distribution. It might also come in the form of some kind of recommendation or discovery service, or personal journaling. Foursquare's new Explore feature is a step in this direction.

There's real opportunity here, and the check-in services have a lot of data they could harness for this. But unless "normal" people find direct, personal value in the service, they're not going to adopt it and the service will remain as a toy for the tech-obsessed.

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.

The most obvious user benefit, it would seem, is being able to see not only where your friends are, but what event they might be at. They don't simply check in to the restaurant down the street, but to the trivia night that's happening that they were invited to on Facebook. The real benefit, we have to imagine, will be for the companies and brands throwing events that want to gather data on who actually attended an event. Imagine the possibilities for all of those companies who throw parties at events like SXSW, with thousands of RSVPs. They have a list of people who were interested in the event, but not necessarily those who attended. Now, they could potentially have both.

As part of this same update, Facebook added the simple ability to view where all of your friends are checked-in on a map. On the Places page of the iPhone app, there are now two options - activity and map. The map shows any friends that are checked in. It's a simple, but potentially fruitful, feature for seeing where your friends who use Facebook Places are.

Unfortunately, the event check-in appears to be a bit broken, at the moment. We created a test event, checked in, and went to the map, only to find that it had placed the event somewhere in the ocean off the coast of Africa. If you click on the address of the event in the event itself, however, it appropriately takes you to exactly that location in Google Maps. Hmm.

Problems aside, why does any of this matter? It could be another inroad for Facebook to convince mainstream users that checking in, both to places and events, is a normal and customary thing to do. And in doing so, it could offer brands another reason to host events on Facebook instead of the plethora of other invite and event sites, such as Eventbrite or Plancast.

RSVPing only indicates a basic interest, or a desire to hold your place, just in case. Actually checking in to an event means that you were indeed there, which could be a valuable piece of information for event organizers. Beyond that, if people are further encouraged to check in, they may begin doing it at other times to. Something like Facebook Places is, after all, only useful if people actually use it.

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?

Creepy takes this idea a step further. It takes a couple minutes to gather all the data - which it searches for according to Twitter or Flickr username - before showing a very detailed map of every Tweet, check-in and geo-tagged picture that person has posted to the Internet for months on end. And depending on how a particular piece of information was sent, such as from a smartphone with an accurate GPS signal, the results can be, well...creepy. We're talking "Yep, I was next to that oak tree in the park when I took that picture" creepy.

So, should you stop broadcasting your location? I vote no. (And not because I want to stalk you, I swear.) I share my location all the time and for a number of reasons. It enables random and serendipitous connections to occur. I can look back and have all sorts of contextual information as I weave my way through the world. I can plug it all in to services like MemoLane and get a time-ordered snapshot of my own life, as I share it online. And in turn, it gets fed through algorithms and stuffed into features like Foursquare's latest recommendation service, which looks at where I've been and suggests where I may want to go next. And that's just the first step for what can be done with all of this location information.

I also get second hand value from all this public location sharing. I see people's check-ins on Twitter and can figure out that the coffee shop down the street is the place to be. Tweets can help with a host of scenarios, from public health issues to mysterious explosions in Portland.

Of course, I may be a bit overzealous in my location sharing. It's on, by default, for everything - pictures, check-in services (which are public) and Tweets. Go ahead - download Creepy and enter @rwwmike and you'll see my recent trips to Palm Springs, CA and Austin, TX. You'll see my bike ride across town to Golden Gate Park. You'll see snapshots of food and beer and bikes.

This isn't for everyone. If you have bad relationships with your exes or lawyers coming after you for bills, you might not want to live so publicly. And are we that far off from insurance companies gathering check-in information and using it to calculate your premiums? But that's what Creepy is about, right? It's saying "Look, you're sharing your life on the Internet and really, everyone can see." The question is, do you care? (And perhaps, far more importantly, should you care?)

Creepy is available for Windows and Linux with a Mac version on the way.

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.

Color hit both the iTunes App Store and Android Marketplace last night, bringing with it the promise of real-time, proximity based photo sharing. Using something the company calls a "multi-lens," the app "intelligently identifies nearby smartphones, whether at a local park or at a concert, using advanced proximity algorithms" and instantly shares photos, videos, comments and likes with them.

According to Nguyen, Color is built on some serious technology. The company has six patents pending and sees itself as "much more of a research company and a data mining company than a photo sharing site."

As such, Nguyen explains that Color can ingest and analyze four times the amount of data than Google did in its early days. This, not a tech "bubble" or an early exit, justifies the $41 million investment.

"We have no interest whatsoever in being acquired," said Nguyen. "This is purely what we need to operate. There are real data needs and real capital costs."

What does this tech offer? Among other things, a new way of looking at location and proximity that, while Nguyen wouldn't speculate, could be used in any number of ways including creating a new way of online social interaction.

Research & Data Mining, You Say?

The pictures and videos you take using Color are much more than just that. They're a piece of sharable media around which Color can collect and retain a number of different data points. When you take a picture or video, Color gathers a variety of information. It collects sound levels, Bluetooth readings, light readings, antenna strength, the time - even the direction you're pointing your phone - and more and uses it all to determine your proximity to other users.

This leaves an obvious question - why not use GPS? This is where the tech we've been talking about comes in.

"Lots of people are trying to create location-based services and using GPS," said Nguyen. "The problem with GPS is that it doesn't work."

Color does things differently by collecting these various data points from the phone's sensors and then looking for proximity by looking for identical inaccuracies.

"When you open the camera, that's our big moment," explained Nguyen. "The information we capture in a very short window is probably not that accurate, but when you compare it to lots of other people and it's identically inaccurate, they're probably in the same place."

The problem, of course, isn't how to gather the data, but how to benchmark it, compare it, and accurately determine location and proximity. That's where Color's patent-pending technology comes in, which Nguyen credits DJ Patil, former chief scientist with LinkedIn, with creating. If you've used many GPS-dependent apps, then you know the battery-draining and inaccurate qualities of modern location. Color offers a way to determine location and proximity in such a non-battery draining, accurate manner that an impromptu and "elastic" social graph can be created from the data, without once ever having to purposefully check in.

The 'Elastic' Social Graph

So, is color just another social photo sharing app? No. There are no friend designations in the app.Instead, your friends are people whose paths your own path intersects with, both in location, time and interaction. The more you interact with someone, the more persistent that connection becomes. Over time, it fades away. Ngyuen calls it the "elastic" social graph and he said it's just one of several other ideas the company is working on patenting.

"That's the part I've never gotten about an online social network - to say that someone is your 'friend.' It's rather kind of random. Shouldn't relationships based on technology work the exact same as real life relationships?" asked Nguyen.

In the world of Facebook, once someone is your friend, they're your friend until you return and re-evaluate that relationship, regardless of whether or not you've ever spoken to them again. In reality, the relationship could have fizzled long ago, yet it's still a bond as good as any. With Color's "elastic" social graph, these ties can fade and disappear. Color's ability to accurately determine location and user proximity is what makes this sort of social graph - an implied, impermanent and elastic social graph - even possible.

Isn't It All Just Bubble-Induced Hype?

I'm going to go out on a limb here and say "no." Color may have offered a terrible first impression for folks out in the boonies with nobody nearby, but it says it's fixing that. It may have shot itself in the foot in terms of rising to the top of the App Store and raking in the new users. It may have even confused and annoyed the early adopter set with its puzzle-esque and sometimes serpentine design, but if it can really do what it proposes - change the way our social graph works by way of accurate location and proximity data - then none of that may matter.

Oh, and before you ask, Nguyen said they do have a monetization plan. It hinges on advertising and one simple fact.

"Our data is so accurate that we know where you are," said Nguyen.

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?

For Yobongo, the value proposition is that a group chat room based on your location and a number of other signals can make it easier to meet the people around you. Co-founder Caleb Elston distinguished Yobongo from other group messaging apps, explaining that "those products are focused on organizing your close friends around very specific topics or events. We are focused on ambient real-time communication with real people you may not even know."

Ask Around, on the other hand, is "a location-centric app that lets people join, save and share conversations taking place in their immediate vicinity." The basic idea here is that the people around you can offer a value that services like Google cannot, based on the simple fact that you have  common location. Why is the train stopped? Google might not know, but the person five cars up might.

So let's look at these two scenarios a bit more: Yobongo wants to make it easier to meet people around me by breaking the ice a little bit and Ask Around wants to help out with local search by providing a way to quickly ask people around me questions in real time.

Say I go to the bar and I'm the shy type. I sit down, order a beer, and whip out my trusty iPhone. I open up Yobongo and I see it says I'm chatting with 10 people near Austin. How long do I sit at the bar and chat with people on my iPhone before the ice has been broken enough to overcome my shyness and finally say "Hey, let's cross the room and talk face to face"? Since this is a chat based around location, it's also very real-time. There's only so much time before one of us potentially moves on to another location and makes the jump from one room to another.

Here's the thing: if I'm the type of person that can't go to a place and meet people face to face, is two seconds of chatting on my phone really going to break down the barriers of introduction enough to get past that? I'm not so sure it is.

Now, Ask.com says that Ask Around can be the service I go to when I want to know about what's going on around me.

We saw some of this location-centric chat behavior evolving naturally in our flagship app and took the hint that there was real interest in having a discussion with those people around you.  Launching Ask Around as a separate app dedicated wholly to this use case lets everyone explore the shared experience of location. Want to have a behind the scenes conversation with friends in the bar? Predict the next play in the game to those watching it with you? Find out where off campus people are heading tonight?  Discover what the crowd across the street is looking at? Ask Around is the app for that.

With Ask Around, the group conversation is entirely public - just as with Yobongo - so I'm not sure how much I would use it for a "behind the scenes" conversation, but what about the rest of these ideas? Do I want to predict the next play with people around me? Is this supposing that I'm at the game or a sports bar? And if so, why does the location actually matter? It would seem we're talking about a topic, not a location. And if the crowd across the street is looking at something, why not cross the street and look yourself?

The biggest question for a service like Ask Around is, who is on the other end? When that hypothetical train stops, do we all jump on Ask Around to talk to people in our immediate location? The idea seems to be based around asking questions to people in a vicinity, but is a location a strong enough bond to get strangers communicating? And if everyone goes on there to ask questions, who's doing the answering?

So, the question really is with group messaging for strangers - how do you keep both parties interested on both ends? What's the incentive to keep Ask Around running on your phone if you don't have a question? For Yobongo, is a mix of location and social signals enough to match user expectations and bring the serendipitous connections promised?

Bringing location explicitly into the formula of communication with strangers is a relatively new thing and we're sure to see more of it, but we're not so sure that it's there quite yet. What do you think? What apps have you seen that do it just right? Has Yobongo brought you serendipity or Ask Around information you wouldn't have otherwise found? So far, it hasn't for me.

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.

"The last decade was the decade of social. The framework for the social layer is now built," declared Priebatsch. "It's called Facebook."

Facebook, with its 600+ million social connections has won the competition in terms of mapping our social interactions, he said. To further cement its position as owning the social graph, he explained, Facebook released the Graph API, which allows developers to utilize its social graph and build upon it.

With that battle won (at least according to Priebatsch), the next battle is over gaming. But we're not talking about simple video games and the like - we're talking about a "game layer on top of the world."

"The game layer is he next decade of human technological interaction," he explained. "Unlike the social layer, which trafficked in connections, the game layer traffics in influence. The game layer seeks to act on individual motivation - where we go, how we do it and why we do it."

So what does this all mean? Priebatsch says that the game layer could be 10 times as large as the social layer and that, used correctly, could help to solve the world's problems.

"It's kind of naïve of me to say that the game layer could solve any of these huge problems, they're just too big," he conceded. "But you don't have to just focus on that. While the game layer cannot solve these massive problems, it can give us the tools to make the solutions possible. It can move something that's impossible to something that's just difficult."

To prove his point, he then ended the session with a game - a massive game involving the entire several hundred member audience. As each person entered the room, they were given anywhere from one to three cards with different colors on each side. Each card had one of three colors on each side and were handed out randomly. To win the game, each row of the audience had to self organize to show only one color by trading with the audience members around them. That is, the entire room had to move from chaos to order, with each row only showing one color, within 180 seconds. If they did this, he said, SCVNGR would donate $10,000 to the National Wildlife Federation.

One minute after he started the clock, he stopped it. The audience had self-organized, despite a variety of problems, in just one minute.

What did this show? Priebatsch compared the various rules and problems faced by its players into ones the world population might face in solving global issues. There was a lack of communication, there were micro-trading issues, different allocations of resources from player to player, restricted movement decentralized leadership, and even different "countries," as aisles served as "oceans" between the rows. The audience did, however, have two things to work with - a countdown and a common goal. Despite these various factors, and through the proper motivation, a large problem was solved quickly through applied game mechanics.

This is Priebatsch's vision for how game mechanics will be applied to real-world situations over the coming decade to solve seemingly impossible problems. I, for one, am looking forward to seeing what comes next from Priebatsch. SCVNGR, it would seem, is just the beginning.

The game layer is coming. It's going to be fun. It's going to be powerful," said Priebatsch. "I wish you all have a great time playing your way through the next decade."

We have to wonder - what will this game look like? If a so-called Facebook Revolution can topple governments, what can applied game mechanics achieve?

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.

Brian Herbert, director of Crowdmap, called the app a "roll your own Foursquare," saying that, with its release, Ushahidi became the only open source check-in platform available across mobile platforms.

Why, you might ask, would you want to "roll your own Foursquare?" The answer is simple - complete control over your own data. At a recent discussion of privacy and location-based services, Reputation.com's COO Owen Tripp discussed the various ways that location data could be used to negatively impact the end-user, from insurance companies using it to deny coverage requests to employers spying on their workers. Just as Status.net and Diaspora work to provide open-source alternatives to Twitter and Facebook, respectively, Ushahidi could provide a number of alternatives to any of the mainstream check-in services. It could also lead to an entirely new realm of specialized check-in services wherein the users control how their data is stored and used.

Beyond the ability to create your own location based service, the Ushahidi checkin app also increases the usability of Ushahidi for smartphone-bearing crisis workers.

"In some cases, it doesn't make sense to fill out full-on reports on Ushahidi, because it can be complicated," said Herbert. "Sometimes you want to be able to just drop a check in on a map, with maybe a photo."

In certain crisis situation, said Herbert, the smartphone app would simply be a "more simple reporting mechanism for something that's happening right now."

The iPhone application is available in the app store now. You can get it from the App Store and the Android app can be downloaded from the Android Marketplace.

If you download the app, make sure to check out SXSW.crowdmap.com where Ushahidi check-ins will be aggregated over the coming week.

The feature is also available now on Android phones, says Google.

Not Seeing It? Maybe You Have No Friends

If you're not seeing this on your Android phone yet, (and I'll admit, I wasn't at first), it could be because you have no friends. Well, no Hotpot friends that is. Even if you have a Google profile set up, or use Gmail and Google Contacts, even if you have taken the time to organize your friends into groups such as "Family," "Friends," "Work," etc., Google has not automatically added any of those people to your Hotpot friends list. You have to manually add people one-by-one.

To add friends, go to Hotpot's "Friends" section where you can scroll through your contact list or type in a friends' name or email address in the box provided. Doing so will auto-suggest entries from your address book, but it's not exactly the same as a search feature. (It's odd to me all the places where the world's number one search engine forgets to provide a true search feature in its products). Anyone you add will then be emailed an invite to join Hotpot.

I decided to not invite anyone to Hotpot, because I'm hesitant to spam friends and family with emails about new services. As a tech blogger, if I invited people to all the services I tried, I'm sure all emails from me would have soon been marked as spam. I wish you could just add friends, and then if they happened to sign up for Hotpot on their own, they would be prompted to accept your request. But I don't live in a dream world. That's not how things work.

Luckily, a few of my Internet buddies have added me to Hotpot already, so I could at least test out some of this new functionality. If I'm ever in the U.K. or San Francisco, I guess I'll know where to eat. Thanks, guys!

Photo of Hotpot, via Google blog post

Incremental Updates Could Make Hotpot Better, Quickly

Google Hotpot is clearly encroaching on Yelp's territory, and ramping up quickly. Even without a friend list in tow, I've been using Hotpot's recommendations via Maps on Android as well as Places, the standalone Android app that just shows restaurants, bars, attractions, gas stations, coffee shops, hotels and ATMs, plus any other search term you care to add. (Places recently came to the iPhone too, but as you may know, I've moved to the Nexus S for now.)

While the standalone app is great, Yelp works well as a standalone app, too. What will make people choose Hotpot? Integration with Google Maps, of course - Hotpot's killer feature. The Maps app is one of the most heavily used apps on Android (or any smartphone for that matter), and Google just launched a local recommendations service right within Maps itself. I'm betting that will work out well for Google, what do you think?

Now, instead of browsing through the newspaper for coupons to clip, you can opt to receive a real-time alert on your mobile device of the coupons available to you, as you enter the grocery store itself.

Beyond the Check-in: Location Gets Practical

Location Labs may not be a familiar name to consumers, but its services operate on the backend of many well known consumer-facing products, like AT&T's FamilyMap and Sprint's Family Location service.

In this case, the mobile couponing service is provided by Location Labs' Sparkle Platform, a toolkit for developers that allows mobile apps to incorporate geofencing technology into their offerings. For those unfamiliar with the term "geofencing," it means that a developer can define a particular geographic area and then have a specific action occur when a mobile user crosses the boundaries of that area.

For example, Sparkle works to power the third-party Foursquare application called Mayor Maker, an app which automatically checks you in to your favorite Foursquare venues without you having to launch the Foursquare app to do it yourself.  While Foursquare is fun, and sometimes offers rewards to its users in the form of discounts or other specials from participating merchants, its focus has been more on the gaming aspects - acquiring badges, points and the honorary title of "Mayor" for the places you frequent the most.

While maybe not as fun as Foursquare, coupon clipping is a more practical use of location-based services, those services which use GPS and/or other mobile tracking technologies to determine your physical location in the real world.

With Cellfire, Sparkle is making "geo-targeted" coupons, as they're called, possible - and it's a first for the grocery store coupon industry.

Using Cellfire

The Cellfire mobile app is available for free from iTunes or from the mobile website at www.cellfire.com. To receive the coupons, you must first enable the Store Alerts feature - it's not on by default. Cellfire also allows you to customize the stores and other conditions that will trigger the alerts.

At present, Cellfire only works in conjunction with stores that offer customer loyalty cards as it allows you to select coupons which will then be processed at checkout when the card is scanned. Unfortunately, the list of participating grocery stores is not remarkable. There are less than 20 brands that work with Cellfire, and Kroger is the only major brand listed on Cellfire's site.

That being said, this is a new and unique use of location-based technology which can provide real value to consumers. The challenge now is getting more brands on board to make it useful to a larger group of shoppers.

The question now is: should you use it? Or should you stick with your favorite check-in application, like Foursquare or Gowalla?

Latitude is Google's own take on friend-tracking location-based services. Like Foursquare, you can use Latitude to see where your friends are, but the similarity ends there. Latitude is a completely different animal than your typical check-in app.

On check-in applications like Foursquare, Gowalla, Loopt, Brightkite and others, you check in to a physical venue through a very manual process. To check in, you launch an app on your smartphone, it locates you via GPS and returns a list of places. You then select the location where you are from the list provided and the app will check you in to that place. It may also dole out a virtual reward of some kind for doing so, including things like points, a stamp or badge or, in the case of Foursquare, the honorary title of Mayor if you've checked in to that venue more than any other user. Sometimes, a coupon or discount is provided by the merchant to those who participate by checking in, too. However, outside of urban tech hotspots like New York and San Francisco, this is still a decidedly hit-or-miss operation.

Latitude, on the other hand, is a real-time tracking service. There aren't badges and coupons here, there is only a pushpin on a map, indicating your location. For users of Google's Android smartphones, tracking your location as you move around town is a built in feature, assuming you've opted in to the service. No dedicated app is needed - it works within Google Maps. However, on iPhone, background location-tracking of this nature requires a native app.

Up until now, I've been using Latitudie for this purpose on iPhone, a third-party application that shares my location with my Latitude friends (err, friend - more on that later). Unfortunately, a recent update has left the app non-functional - it always crashes now. An official Google app will be welcome, to say the least.

Is Latitude Right For You?

But the big question you need to answer now, as the service is poised to become a hundred times more useful thanks to its new, true cross-platform nature is this: should you use it?

Latitude has three privacy settings: detect your location (automatic), set your location (manual) or hide your location. Frankly, the only setting that makes the service worth using is its automatic detection functionality. That alone delivers a huge benefit over Latitude competitors like Foursquare, for example, which requires additional third-party applications like Mayor Maker or Future Checkin to perform automatic check-ins on your behalf.

Of course, you could manually set your location in Latitude - and I'm sure some of you do - but if you're bothering to do all that, why not use a service where you're liable to get an occasional discount or coupon instead? Or, alternately, a dedicated app for private location-sharing like Glympse? (More on that here.)

Over-Friending is a Bad Idea on Latitude

Although Latitude's background tracking is great to have, this major benefit is also the service's biggest privacy concern, too. Automatically sharing your location, in real-time, with all your friends? They had better be good, good friends. In other words, think carefully before accepting friend requests from "that guy you know online." As for me, I only use Latitude with family. I use check-in apps with a wider group of friends.

Some may dismiss this as being overly paranoid, but I think it's just paranoid enough. As a technology enthusiast, I'm happy to embrace location-based services to some extent, but I draw the line at allowing a wide group of "friends" - the same online group of early adopters that follows each other around from service to service - to track my physical location in real-time, plotted on a map. Maybe it's partially because I'm a woman that I feel this way. Or maybe it's because enough of my friends and family have been victims of violence for me to not casually disregard my own privacy and safety, but ultimately the main reason is this: the only person who really needs to know where I am at any given moment (and vice versa) is the one I'm married to. (That metaphor would extend to the rest of my family, too, but the little one is still in diapers - no smartphone yet.) Meanwhile, if my friends want to meet up for coffee, they're welcome to call, email, Facebook or text.

That's an opinion of course. You may feel differently, and that's fine. The trick is figuring out how much location transparency you're comfortable with before signing up for services like this and friending dozens of folks. At least Google is kind enough to send regular emails reminding you that you're sharing your location on Latitude, in case you've forgotten. That effort shows that even Google takes your location-sharing seriously; you should certainly do the same.

The real heart of this update, however, is in the check-in process and the all-in-one "Friends' Activity" stream. Opening up the new Gowalla, there's a "Check In" button at the bottom. Click on it and you're no longer brought to a long list of places. Instead, the app tries to figure out exactly where you are by looking at past check-ins, which the company claims it gets right nearly 80% of the time. Now here's the big part - when you check-in, you can share that check-in on Facebook Places, Tumblr and even Foursquare.

For version 3.0, Gowalla worked to match its locations with their counterparts on Twitter, Facebook Places and Foursquare, making it possible to simultaneously check in to each service. Gowalla also pulls in check-ins from these other services, which means that all of your Foursquare and Facebook friends now show up in your "Friends' Activity" stream. Gowalla even imports "Tips" from Foursquare, which are general notes on locations left by Foursquare users. And if you're worried about your Foursquare mayorship, your Gowalla check-ins count for those too. With this update, Gowalla seems to be saying that if you left or were considering leaving Gowalla because other people were using Foursquare, you don't have to anymore.

Gowalla 3.0 is out for the iPhone and updates for the iPad, Blackberry and Android are on the way in the near future.

What, you ask, only the second-largest hotel chain? Actually, Choice joins Topguest's previous partners, including IHG, the largest hotel chain worldwide. That means the top two hotel groups are now using Topguest's service for location-based marketing. Maybe it's time you sign up, too?

When Topguest launched this summer, we asked if you were sick of "useless badges and mayorships" and ready for something that really paid off? That sentiment has grown in recent months, it seems. Although Foursquare and sites like it are seeing increased numbers of check-ins (Foursquare is almost at 5 million users now), a backlash from those who don't see the point of these apps is growing as well. For example, this recent diatribe on the blog All Facebook vehemently calls out Foursquare and others for massaging our egos to the extreme, in a very bad way. Of course, that's just one example. Another is TechCrunch writer Sarah Lacy explaining why she wouldn't bother with Foursquare.

In addition, a cavalcade of studies on the actual use of checkin services all report nearly the same data - location-based check-ins are still a very niche activity.That doesn't mean their users aren't passionate (they are) or that the trend won't go mainstream at some point (it probably will), it simply hasn't caught on yet.

But why not? What about the deals? There are plenty of those out there, especially if you live in urban areas like New York or San Francisco, but for the rest of us, there's only the occasional retail discount or free cup of coffee. Good to have, but not ground-breaking.

Topguest's Checkins Lead to "Real" Deals

However, with Topguest, you're getting deals that have a bit more impact on your bank account and lifestyle. You can check into your hotel and earn reward points or you can check into your flight and earn airline miles. And unlike in other "checkin" based applications, those points add up to real perks. Instead of unlocking a badge, you can earn free drinks, spa passes, complementary stay credits, 25% off rooms at top hotels and more.

The best part about Topguest is that it works on top of the check-in services you're already familiar with, including Foursquare and Facebook Places. So if you can't stand to lose your mayorships, or whatever else kitschy stuff they come up with next, you don't have to. Just associate that account in Topguest's smartphone app and checkin. (The app is Android or iPhone only, for now. If you're a BlackBerry user, you can still earn points by signing up online.)

Other Parnters

Since its launch, Topguest has been quickly adding partnerships with major travel brands. In addition to Choice it's now partnered with Standard Hotels, Soho/Tribeca Grand Hotels, Viceroy Hotels, Priority Club (Holiday Inn, InterContinental, Indigo), Select Radisson, Best Western and Leading Hotels of the World properties, Thompson Hotels & Restaurants, Avis Car Rental, Kimpton Hotels & Restaurants, Doubletree, Hilton HHonors, Wingate by Wyndham and Virgin America.