ReadWriteWeb

Trover launches Lists today, a new way to highlight the rich, guided tours its pioneer users create for the places they live. At its core, Trover is a location-based photo browser, putting its users' photos on a map you can explore. It uses social networks to help with discoveries, but its emphasis is on the things found by its users.

In addition to lists, which will help highlight individual users more, today's update also adds @-mentions and redesigns the news feed to be more about the people. Trover has positioned itself as a "browser" for places, but when you talk to CEO Jason Karas, you hear Trover is learning that people are part of those places. The new version of Trover is still about discovering places, but it provides the authentic flavor that only the local folks can offer.

As mobile becomes normal for the Web, location becomes key. The next phase of location apps are live, right there with the user as she goes about her business. When it comes to mapping the outside world, the space is pretty crowded. It's hard to argue with Google Maps, whose free consumer service powers the maps on both dominant smartphone platforms. For businesses, it's crucial to be on the map, and Google Places can't be overlooked.

But there's another frontier of mobile mapping that matters, and the exploration has just begun. Indoor mapping of big buildings - like airports, convention centers, museums and stores - is the El Dorado of mobile location. Google has begun its expedition inside buildings, and businesses can sign up and offer their floor plans. But there's another option: Use a platform like Meridian and build your own inside map. Which is better for business?

Google Maps and Google Earth just got their second update of 2012 to add 45º imagery, which now covers 17 U.S. and seven international cities. These 45º views cause buildings to cast shadows and rotate with real perspective. It's an almost-3D view that makes the satellite view of a place more realistic while still supporting most systems.

45º views act as a transition between the standard top-down view and Google's new Google MapsGL, a full-3D Maps experience powered by WebGL in the browser. That part won't work on certain low-end graphics cards, but for those who can run it, Google Maps gets pretty magical. Google has good reason to push the envelope on 3D maps. Its competitors are working on magical maps of their own.

Foursquare has released a new Web version of its Explore tab at foursquare.com/explore. The mobile version of Explore, which launched last March, is for finding stuff to see and do nearby. Today's release of Explore for the Web helps with planning interesting things to do from the desktop or iPad.

In its announcement of Explore for the Web, Foursquare says its mission is "adding an 'interesting' layer to the whole world, tailored just for you." Foursquare Explore draws on the check-ins, tips, lists and interests of your friends to put a layer of "interesting" - which is apparently a noun at Foursquare - on a map. This is a challenge to Google Places and Maps, which is racing to add "interesting", but Foursquare's 1.5 billion check-ins give it a strong position.

The City of Palo Alto, Calif. and mobile workspace-finding app LiquidSpace have teamed up for an exciting step in public co-working. The Palo Alto City Library will make rooms available on LiquidSpace in a 3-month pilot. This is the first instance I can find in the U.S. of a public facility using a location-aware mobile app to reduce its unused capacity.

Co-working is the new normal, and city governments could drive lots of high-tech productivity if they make their latent space available to flexible, remote workers. Palo Alto is an obvious place to start, but every city in the world should start thinking like this.

Last night I rode my wife's bike through North East Portland, Oregon and my new favorite iPhone app purred in my pocket with push notifications each time I passed through a new little neighborhood. "King is a neighborhood bounded by MLK and the river..." it whispered (in text). "Vernon is a traditionally working class neighborhood now subject to gentrification," (like nerds biking through it and freaking out about iPhone push notifications, presumably) it told me.

Wherever I go, whatever I do, if you or I have the mobile app from Geoloqi running and the new Wikipedia layer turned on, we'll receive push notifications whenever we are in the physical proximity of a place or a thing that has been written about in Wikipedia, the world's largest and richest encyclopedia. Now we will know about the neighborhoods we're in, the buildings we're in front of, the landmarks we visit: beyond old fashioned information placards, but with the infinite knowledge of the Internet. If that's not a Super Power, I don't know what is.

The smartphone explosion has invited a bum-rush of new apps - and extensions of old ones - vying to be the way we discover places. Companies big and small are fighting to be the best location data platform. Google and Yelp struggle for dominance of business listings, and valuable geo data providers like SimpleGeo are selling for big bucks.

ReadWriteWeb gets tips about new consumer-facing location apps every day. We like the futuristic whiz-bang idea of augmented reality, so we tend to write these up every once in a while. But geolocation apps have not yet caught on in consumers' minds. That's because most offerings focus on monetizing location, leaving the user interface as an afterthought. Today, I think that changed. I found Localscope, the first location app I've ever used that I think I'll use every day.

For a service that only exists on one platform, Instagram has been wildly successfully. The photo-sharing app for iOS is now on track to hit 15 million users, which as a post SocialFresh points out, is how many people are using Foursquare today.

Among mobile-first social services, Foursquare is arguably the biggest right now, but the geolocation check-in app is on track to be surpassed soon, despite being a year older than Instagram and being available on every major mobile platform and having a highly functional Web-based UI.

A new report from Forrester says that geosocial apps a.k.a. location-based social networks can "help increase in-store visits, your brand's visibility and consumer word of mouth by connecting people with their locations and their friends." Yet consumer adoption of location-based apps is very slow. In 2010, only 4% of U.S. online adults used geolocation apps monthly or more; that number grew to 6% in 2011. In 2010, 84% of US online adults did not know what geosocial app like Foursquare or Gowalla even were; that percentage has changed to 70% in 2011.

Google Maps just went indoors. Starting with Google Maps 6.0 for Android, users of Google Maps can now navigate inside of mapped locations such as airports, malls and IKEA stores. The program launches with selected partners, and any business owner can apply to have a floor plan included.

This is a key move for Google's mobile business, which up until now could only take you to the front door of the place for which you were searching. Google Maps on the desktop recently got 3D photo tours of small locations, an extension of Street View, but this is a bigger step. When Google Maps goes inside, Google can take you all the way from searching for something to holding it in your hand, advertising and data-gathering all the way.