No, Plancast has not hired Owen Van Natta as its VP of Business Development (although there is a plan for his welcoming party). Nevertheless, Plancast is a hot startup – as well it should be, because essentially the idea is what we consider to be half of a location-centric social network.

If you are not familiar with Plancast, it’s really a simple idea that is executed extremely well. A user creates a “plan” which is just “what, when and where” and then anyone (assuming it’s a public plan, which almost all are) can just click a “count me in” button and then join that event. The best part about Plancast is its seamless integration with Facebook and Twitter, not only that it allows you to sign-in/sign-up with these services, but that it broadcasts (hence the ‘cast’ in the name) your plan out with a #plan hastag and a link to the plan. Lots of people have been comparing it to event services such as EventBrite or Twtvite (the later of which is another dead simple but extremely well done app), but we see it differently – we see Plancast as a location app, one that, if combined with a check-in type service such as Brightkite, could form the first true location-based social network. Here’s how.

First of all, Plancast right now is only a browser-based web app – they have not launched any mobile apps to our knowledge. While not crippling, this is certainly something that needs to be rectified if Plancast is to grow into what we think they will be. What Plancast does right now is to allow users to make and broadcast events any time in the future, allowing people to join and post comments regarding the event. Add ticketing and more robust event pages (adding photos and video seems pretty logical in addition to text comments) and then Plancast becomes a full-fledged event site. But it can go further. The part that is missing is what happens when the event comes to pass? Right now, there is no way on Plancast to know if someone is actually attending the event, i.e. have they checked in yet?

Plancast could certainly try to build this half of the service from scratch, but we suspect that more likely, their plan (sorry, couldn’t resist) is to integrate one or multiple location app APIs instead. While Foursquare may be the sexier choice of the moment, we wonder if Brightkite might not make more sense for Plancast. Brightkite and Plancast are closer in design, use and simplicity – neither has a gaming element, and both are pretty open in allowing their users to do basically whatever they want. Also, Brightkite has really strived to build their own half of a social network (and actually merged with one a while back) and we wonder if perhaps they aren’t the better fit for the other side of the equation. We’ll just have to wait and see.

(Fun fact: In a role reversal, I am now blogging, and Plancast’s CEO Mark Hendrickson is now the entrepreneur – he was the first blogger (while at TechCrunch) to cover the launch of a website – ZoomProspector – that I helped launch at my last job.)

The announcement yesterday of Google Buzz all but guarantees that Google has given up on its poorly thought out location experiment, Google Latitude. We’ve held off dropping Latitude into the deadpool in the hopes that Google would innovate around it and make it much more appealing. Turns outs, they decided to go down another path – instead of innovating around Latitude, they decided to trash it and go with something else. Whether it was Buzz, some other homegrown app, or an acquisition (if only they had bought Dodgeball back in the day…wait a minute…), Google obviously realized that they needed a better way to compete in the location space than Latitude. So what was so wrong with Latitude? Well, to state it as frankly as possible, Latitude crossed the creepy line. It was basically pitched as a way for Google to track all of a user’s movements, running all the time in the background (on phones that don’t start with the letter “i”) and then broadcast out that info to your GMail contacts. I.e. it was pitched as a creepy app (of course users have privacy controls, but people hear “always on” and they get creeped out).

On top of a bad product launch roll out, Latitude had (yes, we know it is still technically available, but we’re going to use the past tense nonetheless) major flaws as a social location app. First of all, using Latitude didn’t really add much of anything for the user. Why would a user use an app that just tracked them, where’s the value? Secondly, the app didn’t offer any benefit to anybody watching/following/tracking their contacts (we won’t go as far as “friends”), so why would anyone want to watch/follow/track? The answer is they didn’t – we’re pretty plugged-in guys here at LocationMeme and we can’t think of anybody that ever invited us, asked us or even talked about Latitude – it was a complete flop and Google needed to make a move, especially as other location apps are starting to gain strong traction.

So the logical question now is can Google Buzz establish itself as Google’s location service, and more to the point, can it compete with much smaller players such as Foursquare, Gowalla and Brightkite? And if it can’t beat these small players, how can Buzz hope to compete with Facebook (whenever they launch their location component), Twitter and Yelp? We’ll keep an eye on Buzz over the next few days and will get back to you with our thoughts on Buzz.

We want to throw one last thought out regarding Google and location. The one thing that Latitude did highlight is that Google’s greatest location asset is Google Maps/Earth. Google Maps continues to get better (free navigation in Android 2.1 for instance) and Google continues to build an enormous location database of businesses, restaurants, bars, schools – you name it. Integration with Google Maps was the correct strategy, and we hope that Google will make a way to integrate Buzz with Google Maps, preferably right in GMail. Maybe they could call it Longitude.

* Quick update: Marshall has written a nice post on this same topic over on RWW.*

The backlash against social check-in services like Foursquare, Gowalla, BrightKite, Rummble, Yelp, PlacePop, etc. is beginning.

A few days ago, BusinessWeek proclaimed that check-in type services have “limited appeal.”  Last week, Andrew Hyde of TechStars committed Location Based Service Suicide.    And here on LocationMeme, my colleague Chad wrote a compelling piece on the “creepy line” that comes when you combine the web’s broad definition of friending with location.

So why on earth would anybody want to share their location?

Let me take a shot.

Self Expression

Just like the clothes you wear and the music you listen to, the restaurants, coffee shops, and bars that you frequent are reflections of your personality.  I remember way back in the Dodgeball days, I hacked together a little widget using the RSS feed of my Dodgeball checkins and put it on my various blogs.  This widget wasn’t particularly useful, but in some way, it expressed an aspect of my personality, a little slice of how I wanted the world to view me.

This concept of self expression as a motivation to publish is something that we’ve seen over and over again.  Widgets, Facebook Quizzes, Compatibility Tests – many of the most popular social applications hinge on allowing users to express themselves to their friends and the world at large.  Checking in is no different.

The Passive Invite

I’ve been living in San Francisco for more than ten years now.  My social circle has gotten pretty big – people from the neighborhood, people from my hoops teams, people from the industry, etc.

In many ways, a public check-in is a sort of passive, one to many invite to a big group of people.  It’s a “hey, I’m out and about if anybody wants to join” blast with no planning required, no possibility of rejection, and no social pressure for anybody to actually come.

It’s an ultra lightweight evite, and for me, one that fills a unique need.

The Diary

From travel diaries, to trip reports, to Captain’s Logs, to flight records, keeping track of the places you go is an existing behavior that for whatever the reason, has not yet crossed over to the area of everyday, social outings.  I see this sort of usage pattern as related to what I describe as “the golden age of scrobbling.”  While there can be value in analyzing your own historical check-in data (you can imagine a service built on the Foursquare API which tells you how adventurous you are, or one that matches you with similar people, or one that recommends new venues), for some, just keeping track is motivation enough.

“Don’t You Forget About Me”

One of the few mistakes that Foursquare made in its earliest release was the decision to put walls up between cities.  A few months ago, a Las Vegas check-in would not have been seen by a user’s San Francisco friends.

And logically, you can see why Foursquare would have made this call.  From the perspective of the person checking-in, there is no practical to reason to use Foursquare when you are in a different city.  How can your friends possibly meet up with you?

But Foursquare ended up rethinking this.  Why?  Because despite the lack of any practical reason, people do like checking in while they are out of town, as well as seeing the check-ins of their traveling friends.  From the perspective of the person checking in, it may be as simple as a “Don’t You Forget About Me” shout out to their friends (or perhaps a “aren’t you jealous that I’m traveling and you’re not” jab).

Check-Ins: The Missed Connections Killer

My dream for the mobile web has always been as a way to facilitate real world connections.  I remember having this conversation with somebody while sitting at Dolores Park in San Francisco a few months back with probably more than a thousand other people scattered all over the park’s hilly face.  “How many of these people do we know?”  I asked.  “How many of these people would we be happy to see if we knew that they were here?”

The ability to answer these questions via social check-ins is already starting to become a reality.  If you check in with Foursquare, the “people” tab lets you see who else is in the same venue as you, whether or not you are friends with that person or not.

So there you have it.  Five concrete reasons why you might find yourself rudely whipping out your phone while walking into a bar or restaurant.

Thanks to StatusThis for the cartoon, and please let me know if there are any reasons that we missed.

Believe it or not, not everyone checks in with their mobile phones. Some of us actually use a new fangled device called a laptop, or an even newer fangled device called a netbook. With laptop/netbook weights increasingly (decreasingly?) becoming so light that you can carry them around all day without even knowing you have them, coupled with batteries with charges that can stretch for up to 9 hours, checking into a location based service while on the move with a laptop is increasingly realistic. Along with this hardware evolution, this year also brought us location-aware browsers and HTML5, which among many other improvements, includes a geolocation API.

All of this means that many of the main location services right now offer a web-based version of their service, to varying degrees of functionality. Below is our review of what each of the major services offer from a laptop/netbook (you could of course use your desktop as well, but then you would always be checking in from home or the office). For the sake of simplicity, we’ll use “laptop” to reference all non-phone devices in the rest of the article. Also, to make this list, a service must have a web interface that users can log into, and must allow users to sign up online with just an email or through another services credentials (i.e. Facebook Connect). If a service requires a phone number to sign-up/login we are not including them in this review, as this doesn’t really lend itself to getting users to sign up or use a service on their laptop.

Google Latitude

Although we suspect very few people are using this, it is possible to use Google Latitude from a laptop by installing an iGoogle gadget to your iGoogle start page.

The gadget can then detect your location through self-checkin or WiFi hotspot detection (with Google Gears installed, although we imagine that as Google has already announced they’re switching to HTML5, this will end soon). While this is better than nothing, if Google wants to put Latitude where people will actually see/use it, they need to integrate the service directly into Google Maps (for users that are logged into Google), or better yet, directly into Gmail.

Brightkite

Brightkite is rather unique in the location space – they actually started out with a web-based service and then moved to mobile – as such, it should come as no surprise that their website is one of the most fully featured, including the only service that lets you checkin directly on their main website. Like Latitude, Brightkite doesn’t involve any gaming elements – you share your location, notes, or geotagged photos and that’s it (of course you can comment on other people’s status updates, but that’s not a game).

To checkin on brightkite.com, users must type in their location and then choose from a list – there is presently no auto-detection of location using either Google Gears or HTML5. Brightkite has a very easy to use web-interface, although as long time users, we kind of preferred the old interface which was more map-based – now it is kind of hard to even find a map on the interface (you need to click on someone’s location to see a small map, and then if you want to browse that map, Brightkite sends you off to Google Maps, which is kind of disorienting). Other things that are nice about Brightkite’s web interface is it has Facebook Connect integration for logging in and finding friends, as well as very detailed and easy to use account settings.

Foursquare

Since its launch, Foursquare has notoriously been at the bottom of the pile when it comes to its web interface, especially when to compared to its great iPhone app, which nearly everyone has loved from the start. When it launched, Foursquare – as Loopt still does – required you to provide a phone number to sign up, but they have since removed this annoying requirement to use the service – you can now sign up with an email or through Facebook Connect. The website has improved in other ways as well, with a better homepage, less bugs and a cool “stats” page. That said, Foursquare’s web interface still has one major flaw – you cannot checkin using foursquare.com.

If, however, you are a die hard laptop checkin-er, we have a solution that was pointed out to us by our friend Scott Rafer – you can go to foursquare.com/mobile and checkin using the ubiquitous interface that Foursquare provides for mobile users that don’t have smartphones. Like Brightkite, this option doesn’t have any auto-detection geolocation features.

Gowalla

Gowalla’s website has a nice design, works well, let’s you sign up with an email, has Twitter and Facebook integration and adequate map integration and email notification settings. However, like its main competitor, Foursquare, if you want checkin to Gowalla with your laptop, you need to go to its mobile site m.gowalla.com.

Unlike Foursquare (or Brightkite for that matter), however, Gowalla beats both with auto-detection of location that works quite well. Right now, this is a huge advantage – especially if Gowalla could integrate this interface right into Gowalla.com instead of hiding it at m.gowalla.com (Foursquare of course should do the same, but Gowalla would still win at the moment with auto-detection). Also, m.gowalla.com has a more fleshed out design closer to gowalla.com than the bare bones foursquare.com/mobile is to foursquare.com.

Whrrl

Checking in on Whrrl is similar to Foursquare – you need to go to the m.whrrl.com site, and there is currently no auto-detect feature, i.e. also inferior to Gowalla.

However, Whrrl does something very smart that none of the other services does: when you login to whrrl.com, there is a very clear message that tells you to checkin using the iPhone app or go to their mobile site. Although we still think it is better to integrate the checkin functionality into the main site, at least they have figured out that users with laptops might not know where to go to checkin, and have clearly shown the way.

Conclusions

The main conclusion is this – none of these services does it quite right yet, although Gowalla is the closest. While we understand that everything takes development time, we recommend that all of these and other services we haven’t covered here, do the following:

1. Do not require users to provide a phone number to sign up.
2. Integrate Twitter and Facebook Connect for signing up, signing in, and checkin notifications.
3. Integrate checkin functionality directly into your main website (or at the very least make it very clear to laptop users on where they need to go to checkin, and optimize your mobile site to recognize non-mobile browsers to offer a better looking experience).
4. Enable auto-detection of location from the browser.
5. Embrace the added functionality and screen space that a website experience can offer to add more features for users.

As part of Location Meme’s coverage, we will keep track of location services’ websites and report any improvements or new services that are available to laptop users.