For now, with this small number of participating retailers, this isn't necessarily the most useful feature yet. If Google actually manages to get more businesses to use this feature (and/or to expose their inventory through an API), then Google Product Search - which has remained relatively underused - could easily establish itself as the go-to local shopping service.

For more details about the mobile version of Google Product Search, have a look at this video (the introduction of Product Search starts about 19 minutes into the presentation)

Both apps are showcasing new design features the companies are calling "fresh" and other such things, and while they surely are, some of these other features are what really stand out.

First of all, Gowalla is bringing photos to the location based game, allowing users to upload a photo after checking in. Users can also browse their friends' photos and look at any that have been taken at that specific location.

Next, it's bringing some interactivity to the game, with check-in commenting. When a friend checks in at a place down the street, you don't need to change over to your Twitter client and send them a DM, you can just comment on their check-in. And if you forgot to type a check-in message when you checked in to a spot, you can go back and add it.

In addition to these, Gowalla is bringing out new friend browsing features, enabling you to look through friends, friends of friends, and even their bookmarked spots and trips. With "spot details", including address, phone, Twitter name, Facebook page and website, Gowalla is adding that Yelp (or should I say Foursquare) aspect that was really missing - real world connection information.

And one more feature that may be overloaded next week or may be the talk of the town, "Hot Spots", tells you what the most popular spots near your location are. We haven't had time to really play with it yet, but it sure sounds interesting.

The updates just popped up in the App Store right now so go get updated and let us know what you think - who is going to win the location based battle of SXSW 2010? As far as this round goes, we're calling it for Gowalla.

It will be interesting to see how Facebook's users - who are famously averse to change - will react to the arrival of location as a status update on the service. According to Bilton, Facebook "has been trying to figure out how to add location data to its service without raising potential privacy concerns or negative feedback from its users, as it has in the past with new features and redesigns."

When Facebook introduced the newsfeed (which is now an integral part of the service), a large number of users considered this to be an invasion of their privacy. Location-based services have long suffered from the impression that sharing your location online can be dangerous and services like the Foursquare-based PleaseRobMe have only strengthened this sentiment among many users. Even though Facebook offers relatively sophisticated privacy controls, it will be interesting to see if the service's users will warm up to the idea of sharing their location with their friends. A lot of the success of this service will depend on how well Facebook can educate its users and how it implements this feature and the privacy controls around it.

Will Facebook's Users Care?

It will be interesting to see if Facebook's users are even interested in sharing this information. While services like Foursquare and Gowalla are slowly but surely gaining new users (in part thanks to offering incentives for checking in at various venues), Twitter, which introduced a geotagging API last year and just introduced some location features on its website today, hasn't seen a very strong response from users and developers so far.

Not Competing with Foursquare and Co.?

According to the New York Times report, Facebook isn't trying to compete with location-based networks like Loopt, Gowalla and Foursquare, however. Instead, Bilton argues, the company is far more interested in competing with Google for small-business advertising. This will surely raise additional privacy concerns among Facebook's users.

It's also important to note that Facebook's API, will allow intrepid developers (including Foursquare, Gowalla and Loopt) to develop interesting location-based services on top of Facebook, however.

First Step Towards Integrating LBS Analytics Into Sysomos' Main Services

As Sysomos co-founder Nilesh Bansal told us, the company plans to bring location-based sources - including Foursquare - to Heartbeat and MAP, Sysomos' professional social media and analytics and media monitoring applications. For Sysomos, launching a free service is just a first stop towards learning more about this space.

As services like Foursquare, Gowalla and others continue to gain momentum and slowly inch towards the mainstream, social media monitoring services like Sysomos or Radian6 need to give their customers to monitor these communities. If these services go mainstream, a bad comment on Foursquare about a restaurant could easily have the same effect as a negative Twitter message or Yelp review.

The hearing on consumer privacy was the fifth in a series that seeks to evaluate and eventually legislate location-based privacy issues. It comes none too soon. The recent flood of location based apps and services has significantly shifted liabilities from mobile carriers to app developers and end-users. As Congressman and hearing chair Bobby Rush of Illinois said, Yesterday there was Facebook, and in the not-too-distant future we will be encountering something more akin to a "Placebook."

These are the many questions that this congressional hearing sought to address. Here's a breakdown:

What does the privacy research tell us?

Lorrie Cranor, direct of CyLab Usable Privacy and Security Laboratory at Carnegie Melon University testified about her research into how end user's react to the implication of privacy loss due to location-based technologies. She also reported on her survey of the most popular applications and systems.

"In August 2009 we evaluated 89 location sharing applications and systems to determine the types of privacy protections each offered," she said. "Overall, we found that most of these applications provided fairly limited privacy controls and about a third of them did not provide readily accessible privacy policies on their websites. We reviewed the websites for these applications again in February 2010 and found similar results for the 84 services still in existence at that time."

Who will have access to our information?

Last Tuesday we reported in our Ads with Eyes post about a report by the Center for Democracy and Technology on advertising abuses that mobile end-users may face. The center is also concerned about abuses of law enforcement and government agencies related to their use of location-based information.

At last week's hearing John B. Morris, general counsel for the center presented the case for why the Electronic Communications Privacy Act should be updated to protect location information from inappropriate disclosure to government. He highlighted how recent court proceedings and local government surveillance protocols are creating contradictory rulings, unclear jurisdictions and generally snowballing into a fundamental lack of privacy protection for U.S. citizens.

What's the latest wording of potential new laws and guidelines?

The preliminary language of almost all future U.S. laws begin in hearings such as these. In his testimony, Tony Bernard, VP of Useful Networks, sought to outline some of the most essential elements of this new language.

"In order to derive an end user's location from any source, the end user must be presented with notice of how, when and by whom location will be used," he said. Additionally, said Altschul, senior VP and general counsel for the Wireless Association, "Notice must be provided in plain, easily understood language. It must not be misleading, and if combined with other terms or conditions, the portion pertaining to the location-based service must be conspicuous."

How will kids and young adults be affected?

Anne Collier, Co-Director, ConnectSafely.org testified that new technologies are not as much of a threat to children as we may believe, and the real issue is the quality of parenting and supervision that kids are getting. As far as kids' potential for future use of location based services, she presented startling data. "U.S. teens now send or receive an average of 3,146 text messages a month and 9- to 12-year-olds 1,146, according to the latest figures from Nielsen," she said. "For them, a text isn't like a phone call, it's part of a conversation as well as of the ongoing flow (or seemingly 24/7 drama) of school life. But texting is only one of young people's social tools. There is as yet no data on teens' mobile social mapping or LBS use, but we know that more than 65 million, or about a third, of Facebook users of all ages currently access the social site through their mobile devices."

What comes next? At the end of the hearing, Rush said, "In closing, let me state clearly, for the record, and especially for those interested consumer groups, industries, and government regulators who have been monitoring our series of hearings that, with the information we'll obtain from today's hearing, we have now learned enough to take the next major step."

What should that next step be? Are you ready for more clearly defined location-based privacy protections? How can companies who are currently building applications and services keep themselves out of the courts? Do we really need more regulation to resolve this? What do you think?

The story became particularly interesting today: Hendrickson's new company Plancast is submitting its much-anticipated iPhone app to Apple days before SXSW and announced on Hendrickson's alma matter tech blog TechCrunch that it has raised just short of $1m from a list of industry stars. We offer below some perspective on what Plancast aims to do: nothing less than "to be the platform for all 'intent' data," Mark Hendrickson says.

Now that Twitter is such an unqualified success in all but monetization, it's cool to say you've got the same problems Twitter had.

Mash up all those plans from friends and you get an interesting stream of forthcoming events.

The site is simple, if smart, today. The little company has big plans for the future, though. "We want to host and distribute all content that pertains to what individuals, organizations and businesses have planned for the future," Hendrickson says. "If you break the idea of an 'event' down into its basic units (what's going to happen, when, and where), there's a ton of relevant social content through the long tail. We're designed to host a superset of all this event data."

Leveraging the Future

If the web first enabled people to publish diaries of their past actions, then moved on to status updates and check-ins about current thoughts and locations, then Plancast aims to be focused on the Future. "I think [the future has] been a neglected area in geo-location discussions," Hendrickson says.

"Check-ins have dominated the conversation over the past year, and check-ins are great for what they are - but they have a certain limited value. If someone checks in somewhere across town, what are the chances you're going to get up and hustle over there to join? You also have limited data -- often you dont know why they're there. From an advertiser's point of view, you have to grab their attention immediately. Whereas if you have intent, you have more time to give them an offer and have them consider that offer and act on it. The scope of planning data is larger than check-in data in other ways too. Check-ins are really specific to particular venues -- bars, retaurants, parks etc. so the scope of content/ads you can serve up is quite local."

This conversation about the future needed to move on to something other than advertising.

"It's absolutely a platform," Hendrickson told us.

"It's not just a consumer destination. We're building our API early [expect to see it launch very soon] because we want to be the plumbing for future intent data. We want to power third party website calendar systems, third party apps, mash ups, etc. We want to do analysis on big data sets that compile intent data from all over. Once we start pulling from lots of sources -- Facebook, Meetup, Linkedin, Twitter, Dopplr, Tripit, etc etc -- we can then match intents and figure out really cool stuff. 50% more people are planning to see Avatar this weekend vs Hurt Locker. And we can pump this data back out to other companies that have special needs for it.

"Let's say one day you can search 'movies' on Plancast and it knows A) your location, B) your past behavior, C) your friends' activity, and D) aggregate activity. The top result could be a movie showing that 2 of your friends have already planned to see and which is very popular in aggregate in your city."

Hendrickson says he's hard at work building out privacy settings that will help more people feel more comfortable sharing more plans. That's easier said than done, of course. This young, philosophically-trained startup co-founder from Palo Alto would be well-served by reaching out and bringing close to the company some advisors who specialize in understanding the privacy concerns of everyday people online, if he's going to build a platform for the future of our communication around intent. Location based social networks in general face a big challenge in making people comfortable using them and demonstrating their utility before they can become mainstream phenomena.

For now Plancast is hiring engineers with its new money, which was just announced today. Investors include SoftTech VC, True Ventures, Founders Fund Angel, and Zelkova Ventures. Angels Aydin Senkut, Saul Klein, David Cohen, Joshua Schachter, Dave McClure, Dan Martell, Ron Bouganim and Paige Craig put in money as well, bringing the total to $800,000.

Things have come along quickly since Hendrickson was writing blog posts at TechCrunch, he left the staff there one year ago this Wednesday, and bought the domain Plancast.com for $500 last summer. ("I thought about buying Plancaster," he says, "but some guy named Paul Lancaster had it.")

Can this young man and his team build "the platform for all 'intent' data?" Marketing analyst Jeremiah Owyang has been bullish on Plancast for months. He described it as a leading example of the forthcoming "intention web" in December.

Expect the real-time web to quickly evolve into the intention web. People will work together to share their information about what they plan to do, and improve how they work or organize. Expect Social CRM systems (Salesforce, SAP), Brand Monitoring vendors (Radian6, Visible Technologies), and Search Engines (Bing and Google) to quickly try to make predictive models on what could happen, and what are the chances. Businesses that have a physical location like retail, events, or packaged goods can use this data to anticipate consumer demand. They may offer contextualized marketing, or increase or decrease inventory or store hours to accommodate. Don't be surprised in the future and you walk into a store with your preferred items, meal, or drink already nicely packaged for you.

Plancast may or may not play a big role in transforming visions like that into reality, but it's definitely a startup worth watching either way. Look for the company's iPhone app later this week (built by high-profile developer Leah Culver) and check out the many listings of SXSW events on the site already, including our very own ReadWriteWeb event on Saturday night. We'd like to know if you plan on joining us.

Shoutem: Niche Networks for Communities

Having recently exited its beta testing phase, Shoutem's globally available service lets users easily create private mobile social networks without needing programming and development skills. With their platform, anyone can control the access and the design of their network and launch it as a mobile application for the iPhone, Blackberry and soon, Android.

Shoutem recommends using their product to build specialist niche sites for sports fans, clubs and events. Already, some companies have launched their own small networks using the service. NFL Shouts, for example, lets game fans communicate with each other during football season. Ranch and Rodeo, meanwhile, connects an international audience to a destination site where fans can interact.

Socialight: Better for Brands, Businesses...and Mom?

The other company to recently launch something in this space is Socialight. With their new Socialight Community Platform, anyone can create networks which are accessible via the web, a WAP site or an iPhone app. The company seems to have more of an enterprise focus than Shoutem, noting how their tools have helped "companies and brands" create their own apps. However, the tools Socialight provides can be used by anyone, even individuals...even your mom as explained in this video on Vimeo.

Not Just Mobile, Location-Based

What's interesting about both launches is their focus on location-based services. In Socialight's case, they offer tools for sharing geo-tagged photos and other location-based community content, all of which can be viewed on a map interface. From the mobile application, users can upload and share anything - whether that's a photo, video or text - and have it posted to the network.

Shoutem does much of the same thing with tools that enable file and photo uploads. They also target their app to local communities like colleges, cities, restaurants, bars and clubs.

Why Niche Networks for Mobile?

Considering that there are already several popular mobile social networks out there, including Brightkite, Loopt, Gowalla and Foursquare to name a few, you may wonder why people would need to join yet another. The answer to that question is two-fold. One difference is access. These niche networks can be closed communities for just a select group of people working on an invite-only system. The second difference between those publicly available services and the ones designed with these new toolkits is that they are laser-focused on a single purpose. You may not want to spam up your Twitter account where you promote your business to discuss things related to your local book club for example, but you could easily do so via a niche network.

But perhaps an even better example involves how local businesses could use these tools in building apps for their customers. On Socialight's homepage, they're currently featuring "Socialight Concierge," a toolkit for the hotel and tourism industry which lets companies create "curated concierge experiences" where "guests access location-based information about restaurants, shops, and places to visit, together with city tours and historical points of interest, all in a branded environment." The richness of this mobile application goes far beyond anything we've seen with the simplified DIY mobile app building tools. These are no mere informational apps, they're comprehensive networks where some content is managed by the business, but the real value comes from the customers socializing within the community.

You can start building your own network today on Shoutem here or Socialight here.

Preparing for Chrome OS?

It makes sense for Google to enable geolocation for Chrome, especially given the impending release of the Chrome OS, which will also benefit from these new features. Mozilla already offers a built-in location API for Firefox and with Geosense for Windows, Windows 7 developers can now also make use of Google's Geolocation API in their native apps.

Location for Every Browser

Thanks to the current efforts by most browser developers, location APIs will soon become ubiquitous and hopefully more developers will make use of them. While a number of mobile apps for the iPhone, for example, now make use of the location feature in the mobile version of Safari, only a small number of browser-based apps are currently aware of your location. While using WiFi location isn't quite as precise as using a GPS, the precision is usually much better than relying on a user's IP address.

For more of our thoughts about location as a platform, also have a look at this post: The Era of Location-as-Platform Has Arrived.

In a poll we ran last night about competing location networks, Mark Krynsky, founder of Lifestreamblog and CheckInBlog, left the following comment: "I'd like to see a a multi-checkin service make its appearance at SXSW that would allow me to check into all 3 mentioned in the poll (more if possible) at once.

A universal check-in system is the next logical step for location based social networks. It's just no fun to use one service but give up the ability to see where your friends on other networks are. Siloed social networks end up competing not on the quality of their services, but on the number of your friends they have locked-in to their network in particular. Setting users free through a universal, interoperable check-in would be a bold move. It will be interesting to see how Brightkite tries to do it and how its competitors respond. (We've got inquiries in asking a few of them.)

Hopefully a universal check-in system will be good for all players in the field. That was the vision of Yahoo's FireEagle, which you don't hear a lot about these days.

Brightkite says it has 2 million active monthly users and it was the clear winner in last night's ReadWriteWeb poll asking which location service people would use at SXSW. But it gets far less media hype these days than Foursquare and Gowalla and admittedly approximate web traffic services don't show Brightkite in the lead at all.

Either way, offering up a way to read from and write across multiple location based social networks would be absolutely fabulous. Our fingers are crossed that this is what we'll see from Brightkite in a few weeks and that it will be good.

Update: Foursquare founder Dennis Crowley says this is news to him and a reader in comments points out that Gowalla's API is read-only, making a universal check-in impossible. Gowalla has said it is working on a write capable version of its API, though. Time will tell what's going on! If not Brightkite, then somebody needs to build a universal check-in system ASAP. Google Buzz may be a good place to look for this as well, see How Google Buzz is Disruptive: Open Data Standards. Our fingers remain crossed.