Well we were going to have to talk about this at some point. If you check in somewhere, you are presumably not home. And if you are not home and that information is publicly available, someone with bad intentions could try and rob your home. Oh.  My.  God. To highlight this opportunity / risk, there [...]

As it does almost every year, TED has gotten people excited about the next big thing – and this year that next big thing is augmented reality. Well, actually it’s more likely to be the big thing in 2011 or maybe even 2012 (we would humbly suggest that check-ins are the big thing now). Nevertheless, [...]

In one of our favorite Valentine’s Day posts of all time, Chris Dixon posted about the “geo stack” – a model for how to think about the various layers of the geolocation ecosystem.  According to Chris, the stack looks something like this: lat long detection > lat long translation (into venues, addresses, etc.) > user [...]

Six clicks, plus typing content into your phone. That’s what it takes to share your location with Google Buzz.  Here is the break down: 1 Tap on your Google Buzz bookmark2 Tap on “Nearby”3 Tap on the list of Nearby places4 Select a location5 Tap on “share what you’re thinking”6 Enter content (required)7 Click post [...]

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 [...]

As millions of iPhone/iPod Touch and soon to be iPad users know, Apple’s SDK’s biggest drawback is single-tasking (i.e. no background processes). As the dominant mobile platform (we don’t want to debate “best” or “most used” – Apple’s SDK is the first mobile platform almost all developers develop their apps for first, so it is [...]

* 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 [...]

A new social check-in app called PlacePop quietly joined the social checkin space over the weekend. This is what they have to offer so far: – The ability to check in to a place – Aggregated reviews and tweets from Yelp and Twitter – The ability to add a photo (oddly lacking from Foursquare and Gowalla, [...]

Well, that was fast. Just as features like user profiles, status updates, and friend graphs have become standard fare on social media sites, it appears that the social check-in will soon follow. With the entrance of big fish like Yelp into the social check-in space, and the rumored entrance of even bigger fish like Facebook [...]

Twitter’s new Local Trends function on Twitter.com is basically meaningless. It’s full of spam (just as the global Trending Topics is) and really isn’t all that interesting because: 1. lots of the same trends go across the limited number of places Twitter is offering right now; and 2. there is no context for the user [...]