Don’t let the flood of press about Gowalla and Foursquare fool you – it’s still very early days when it comes to location based check-in applications.

Here are a couple of data points:

- The current world record for check-ins at a single venue is 242 – a Boxee meetup in Foursquare’s home town, New York City.  This was the dream Foursquare checkin scenario – Boxee is a darling of early adopters, and shares   investors with Foursquare.

- My San Francisco based startup recently interviewed ten intern candidates, all iPhone owners.  All between 21-25.  All ten had Shazam on their phones.  None of them had heard of Foursquare or Gowalla.

- At the Treasure Island Music Festival in San Francisco two months ago, there were 33 Foursquare checkins.  This out of about 4000 attendees from San Francisco / Silicon Valley between the ages 18-40.  And if checking in hasn’t busted out of the early adopter crowd in San Francisco, it certainly hasn’t in Philadelphia.  Or Sao Paulo.

Foursquare is reporting about 160K users, and Gowalla about 55K users.  A recent GigaOm article puts MyTown at 250K users, though it’s unclear if those folks are really checking in, or if they are just playing the game.

Product innovation is still in its very early stages, and we haven’t seen anything innovative on the marketing side yet.
It’s early days folks.  It’s anybody’s ball game.  So crank out those wireframes, spec out those game mechanics, build those apps, and throw your hats into the ring.

Location is a big, rising tide, and there are going to be a lot of winners.

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