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 is a brand new service called PleaseRobMe that aggregates public check-in data from the Foursquare API via a robber friendly UI complete with location and user name filters.

Does this signal the end of social check-ins?  Will Foursquare and Gowalla have to shift to the MyTown “check-in from the comfort of your own couch” model?

Probably not, but it is forcing very young services to handle sensitive PR issues early in their development.

Anybody who uses social media a lot knows that there are plenty of ways you can get yourself in trouble by oversharing.  Tweeting about those difficult term sheet negotiations.  Posting pictures of yourself in drag while at a Tea Party rally.  Threatening people.

But the stakes are a little higher with location because there is such a direct real world tie in.  Making an effort to minimize those risks without scaring away new users or throttling growth will be a difficult, sensitive challenge for these tiny start-ups.

Of course the risks exposed by PleaseRobMe are probably a bit overstated.  Access to perfect information isn’t the only factor that prevents people from becoming robbers.  There’s stuff like the law, ethics, competence, laziness, etc.

Plus, about 90% of the population leaves their home on a regular, predictable basis to go to work, which isn’t generally considered a security risk.  And many people who are checking in have roommates.  And pity the poor robber who tries to rob Krazy Dad because of an inside tip he was at the North Pole.  Etc.

Security and privacy issues have been raised before in regards to social check-ins.  On this blog, Chad has talked about the “creepy line” when you combine friending and location, and there was also the location based service suicide chatter.

But the questions raised by PleaseRobMe are good ones and represent the most aggressive, direct communications challenge for the social check-in space yet.  Clearly these questions were going to have to be answered eventually if social check-ins had any chance of going mainstream.

Here’s to hoping that Foursquare and Gowalla do a good job of handling this little media firestorm.

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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, when augmented reality finally comes to fruition in scale, more than any kind of apps, social location services will be propelled to new heights.

There are many reasons why this will be the case. First of all, as we have mentioned before, checking in will be a much more compelling experience once those check-ins are verified (and there will be less cheating going on for sure), preferably by interacting with the surrounding environment. Although this can be accomplished through other ways than high bandwidth augmented reality, other means will be much less compelling than this new medium, which means they won’t win out over augmented reality.

In Person over Remote

Secondly, while it will be possible to sit at a laptop to view locations anywhere (indoors and outdoors) with augmented layers, this medium really comes into its own when it enhances the user’s interactions within their immediate vicinity. So while playing with augmented layers over Street View in Beijing from a coffee shop in Berlin will be fun, walking around Beijing with a augmented reality capable phone will be more beneficial, immediate and most importantly social for the user. Walking in to the Forbidden City with your phone, checking in, and then searching the palace for Foursquare badges (or maybe even seeing other users “wearing” their badges), is going to be much more fun than sitting thousands or even a couple of miles away and trying to do something similar from a laptop. Other kinds of augmented reality could also be activated when a user is physically present – wouldn’t you like to shake the hand of the emperor?

Fun over Utility

Which leads us into another reason augmented reality and location services are a perfect fit. Many of the currently popular social location apps are popular because they are fun – utility is at best right now a side effect. And while there will be many utilitarian uses of augmented reality, first and foremost people will want to have fun with it, therefore gravitating to those apps that offer gaming elements over more serious uses. As we mentioned above, a clear example would be Easter egg hunting for badges and other virtual goods (which is basically what Gowalla is in an un-augmented app world). Gaming and virtual goods have proven to be tremendous business models and it will come as no surprise to us if the first wave of augmented apps are mainly games. Of course, in this case, Foursquare and Gowalla may have to compete with Zynga and Tencent and others, but even though those giants have the edge in online gaming and virtual goods, location-savvy startups should be able to level the playing field with better location-aware apps.

Check-in activated advertising

On the topic of revenue (such a pesky topic, isn’t it?), the inevitable revival of display advertising in augmented reality another major source of income for location apps. Step into a baseball park, check-in, and watch signs pop up to give you discounts on hot dogs, beer and peanuts. It won’t really matter if those signs are already there in real life – the augmented ones will have high conversion rates so they will be there (possibly even overlaying the actual physical sign). Virtual signage that only appears when a user checks in will continue to drive the desire to check-in (whether manually or through auto verification), although we fully expect that there will be plenty of augmented signage just hanging in the air whether users check-in or not. That said, current location apps that continue to build relationships with venues should have a step up over newer entrants on securing augmented advertising deals.

Are they ready?

Finally, we wonder whether or not current location apps are ready or willing to tackle augmented reality functionality. Of course, augmented reality will need an ecosystem to truly thrive, but some of the examples we gave above, such as hunting for prizes or viewing other users’ badges can be completely within the control of the apps themselves. Perhaps this functionality will not come from the startups themselves, but through developers using APIs. Regardless of where it comes from, however, apps that combine what’s great about location apps with the seemingly unlimited potential of augmented reality, should do very well indeed.

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 relationship (how to get consumers to share location) > recommendations (tips, reviews, etc.) > social graphs > monetization.  If you haven’t already, please click through and read the whole post – the comments are worth reading as well.

We’ve taken the liberty of trying to visualize this stack with a few tweaks and notes – for instance, we’ve included social graph in the “User Relationship” layer, and example companies who we see as competing at the various layers:

If you are working on something in the geolocation / social check-in space, you may find it helpful to think about where you fit into this stack, and what you need to do to stake and defend your claim in what is rapidly becoming a very competitive area.

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 bookmark
2 Tap on “Nearby”
3 Tap on the list of Nearby places
4 Select a location
5 Tap on “share what you’re thinking”
6 Enter content (required)
7 Click post

Compare this to Foursquare:

1 Open Foursquare
2 Click Check-In
3 Click Venue
4 Click “Check-in” here

If the world of UGC has taught us anything, it’s that the easier a publishing activity is, the more people will do it.

Checking in with Foursquare and Gowalla is far easier than with Google Buzz.  And the delta is not trivial.  When you consider the hassle of typing content into your phone, I would say that it’s probably more than twice as hard to share your location with your friends with Google Buzz, than it is with Foursquare.

Google Buzz may be Google’s best social media product yet, and it may take a dent out of Twitter and Facebook.

And as my colleague Chad says, it very well may signal the end for Latitude.

But this is no Foursquare killer.

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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.

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 dominant), many social location services have built their apps to work in a single-tasking environment, first and foremost. To take this a step further, an argument could be made that the whole check-in craze is the bastard child of the limitations of Apple’s SDK. Would this space have evolved if Apple’s SDK supported multi-tasking? Well, we certainly have made the case for checking in as a concept that stands on its own merits, and Foursquare and Gowalla and others have made great progress in utilizing the focus of single-tasking to make relatively straightforward apps, but still, we would argue that the intrinsic value of check-ins aside, these apps are not all that they could be.

Back in September of last year, Loopt announced that they had hacked together a way to go around the background process limitation. Loopt made a complex agreement with “many partners” (including presumedly AT&T) to use cell tower triangulation to approximate a user’s location to update that user’s Loopt location (for a monthly fee). Here’s what I wrote at the time in the comment section of MG Siegler’s TechCrunch article covering this:

“Here’s my take. As far as a good way to create a revenue stream for themselves and AT&T, this is a smart move. However, as many commenters have already pointed out, cell tower triangulation really doesn’t make this all that special. Best case scenario is that I have some idea where my friends are in a city/area but I will have not have any idea what they are up to unless they check in somewhere (this is somewhat true even for GPS as street address doesn’t necessarily tell me what my friends are up to, but obviously it’s much more precise). When an app/phone can push and allow me to verify (or best case, do the verifying itself) where I am and what I’m up to, then we’ll see a breakthrough in this space.”

As I said then, I don’t think that this is very big news – cell tower triangulation has been around for awhile, and who wants to pay a monthly fee when their phone already has GPS and they’re paying a lot of money for 3G connectivity? Right, a very limited number of people. As I said in the comment, even if Apple allowed background processes that connected to the iPhone’s / iPad’s GPS (we still want GPS for the iPod Touch allow with that pesky camera), that still wouldn’t confirm to my friends what I’m up to – they could probably take a pretty good guess, but verification would still be needed in order to be sure – whether I, the user, do it myself or some other part of the app does it for me. This last part is what we see as the killer approach, and here is why…

Social location applications will truly come into their own when the apps themselves interact with the environment around the user’s physical location. What do we mean by this? Here’s an example – a user walks into a shopping mall and the app running in the background (again, running in a multi-tasking environment, i.e. not on Apple’s SDK right now, but Android, WebOS, whatever) and utilizing GPS pushes out a map of the mall with all of the user’s friends that are currently in the mall and shows them moving around the floorplan, and perhaps highlights what shops are having sales, and could even verify your correct location by cross-referencing it with other friends that have already checked into a location - all without the user having do initiate anything. Understand, this is separate from checking in – this is having the app push helpful info to the user without having them reveal their location to their friends or the world – the check-in would work as an endorsement (as we’ve mentioned before in this blog) but it wouldn’t be necessary to get something out of the app (i.e. you don’t get to be the mayor of anywhere on Foursquare unless you check-in). We could offer dozens of other examples, but we’ll let your imagination run wild instead.

So back to Apple. As the dominant mobile platform, Apple’s current SDK is severely stunting the growth of social location apps, both for developers and in how fast the average user adopts these kinds of apps (i.e. the average user needs to see more value come out of location apps). If the push for better and more useful location apps continues, developers will be faced with a very hard decision – to stay with Apple in the hope that they can gain more users and switch them over to better features if/when Apple finally decides to allow background processes, or opt to stay on the bleeding edge and build innovative features/apps on other platforms such as Android.

* 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.

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:

PlacePop doesn’t seem to bring anything new to the table, but the features that are there are nicely designed.  The aggregation is especially well done (another social checkin company that is doing heavy aggregation is Buzzd).  To the untrained eye, this will look like an app with a lot of users.

Somehow, friending beyond one by one invites didn’t make it into the release version of the app.  I’m sure there was a heated internal discussion about that – while it’s great to get something out the door, not having Facebook and Twitter integrated friending for launch in a social app is an unusual move.

Via their URL structure, it looks like there are about 1585 different profiles set up for PlacePop so far.

Oh yeah, one final little tidbit about PlacePop – it was developed by Ooga Labs, and is headed by Kent Lindstrom, the ex President of Friendster who led that company’s turnaround.

Why is this important?  Because if you ran a high profile social network, you are, or know, a master in viral distribution.

And as PlacePop is late to the game and light on features, winning on distribution is just about their only chance.

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 and Twitter, the social check-in seems to be progressing from differentiator to commodity.

Says Om Malik in the comments section of his interview with Josh Williams from Gowalla:

“I am still waiting for services like FSQ and GOW to come up with a value proposition that goes beyond checking in — which I believe is nothing more than a cool functionality for starters.”

And Marshall Kirkpatrick has this to say in ReadWriteWeb’s “The Era of Location as a Platform” post:

The mobile location “check-in” is fast becoming the hot new status message type online. It was only a matter of time until “where you are” became a platform to build added value on top of just like “who you know” has on social networking sites like Facebook.

And here is, uh, me from my “Is Social Location a Feature or a Business?” post:

I’m personally of the opinion that social location will, and should be, a feature on many existing sites.  Location adds context to many different web verticals – reviews, search, blog posts, photos, videos, etc.

And most credibly, here’s a snippet from a Business Insider article today:

For his part, Foursquare cofounder Dennis Crowley told us he fully expects Facebook and others to launch “check-in” functionality, making it “commodity by the end of the year.”  Dennis says Foursquare’s survival depends on providing “the most incentive for a user to check-in.”

Facebook can probably get away with offering a stripped down social check-in as part of its service, and Twitter will likely do so as well, relying on 3rd party developers to do the creative stuff.

But I expect to see lots of innovation from everyone else in the coming months in order to avoid being commoditized.  Already, it would appear that Gowalla might be moving towards the travel vertical with the introduction of  Trips – user generated bundles of various checkins by theme (bar crawl, museum tour, art gallery walk, etc.).

Foursquare was the early innovator in the social check-in + game dynamics, and I expect to see them continue to go down this road.

Yelp is clearly trying to use check-ins as a validator for its core review business – a review + check-in carries more weight than a standalone review.

What other social check-in mash-ups and angles will we see over the coming months?  Check-ins + news?  Check-ins + deals?  Check-ins + photos?  Check-ins for the enterprise?

There is growing evidence that there may be widespread consumer interest / comfort with sharing their location.

With that hurdle mostly crossed (thanks in large part to Foursquare), we should now be entering a fun stage of experimentation and innovation.

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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 other than millions of other people in their city or country tweeting. We held off on writing about Local Trends until today because until Tuesday only about 1% of Twitter users had Local Trends enabled (not sure if it is 100% now, but lots of people now have it enabled) and second, the API function related to Local Trends wasn’t turned on either until the last 24 hours or so. As with most things in the Twitterverse, the API is where it’s at, and now Local Trends can really get interesting.

Twitter’s API team turned on two calls – Local Trends/available and Local Trends/location. While Twitter is still apparently building out the places that they can offer trends around, this API call will allow developers to go beyond geotagging of tweets (which will discuss below) and map out trends and search parameters inside of their applications. One interesting line in the API documentation says that Local Trends are “an array of “locations” that encode the location’s WOEID and some other human-readable information such as a canonical name and country the location belongs in.” We read that as saying that Twitter is using a mix of ways to determine a user and a tweet’s location, and not just relying on lat/long. Obviously, there could be many uses for this.

One use that comes to mind is a “breaking news” application that could push out notifications to users when a local topic starts to trend. Another could be a map-base app that shows heatmaps of trends, for instance, which trends are hot or not in different areas of a state. Check-in apps (i.e. Foursquare, Gowalla, Yelp) could also use this data to compare check-ins across a trend – so for instance, on New Year’s Eve, users could drill down on the “Happy New Year!” trending topic to see where people mentioning that trend in their city are checking in, which could be a good indicator of where the best party spots are. The possibilities are not limitless, but there are a lot of ways this data can be used.

That said, there are three major drawbacks to what is in place right now. First of all, spam is a huge issue that right now often accounts for 50% or more of trending topics on Twitter, and we’ve noticed the same thing happening with Local Trends. Twitter needs to figure this out, and needs to figure it out fast, or the entire concept of trends is going to be worthless. Secondly, Twitter’s attempt to get users to geotag their tweets has been to all reports nearly worthless – almost no one is turning this option on, so the accuracy of Local Trends has to be called into question we think. Finally, while Local Trends (if accurate) is interesting in a discovery kind of way, it really isn’t all that relavant to the user because right now there are no filters in place to see what’s trending locally among your local followers or people you follow. Foursquare quickly figured this out when they added friend leaderboards in addition to city mayorships soon after they launched last year, and major apps that figure out this kind of filtering will have a hand up on their competitors. We will be closely monitoring which apps integrate Local Trends, and more importantly, what they do with this new feature.