I spent some time this weekend playing with MyTown – an iPhone app with a location component that is claiming more than 500K users.  You may know them from blog titles such as “Foursquare Who? Gowalla What?” that reference MyTown’s reported 500K users and 31M check-ins. So what’s the deal?  Is MyTown really kicking the collective [...]

Companies like Foursquare and Gowalla are trying to build businesses – and venture businesses no less – based on helping people share their real world locations. Local business review juggernaut Yelp recently bolted on social location check-ins to their iPhone app.  Twitter and Facebook are almost certain to turn on some sort of location based [...]

The social location landscape changed dramatically this weekend. Yelp, the 800 pound gorilla of local social media, revamped its popular iPhone app in order to let users check in to locations. So how will this affect social location services like Foursquare and Gowalla? I think it’s a devastating development for them, a brutal punch in [...]

There are a bunch of  social location apps out there.  Here are some of the ones I have on my iPhone right now: Rummble, Loopt, Brightkite, MyTown, Whrrl, Stalqer, Buzzd, AroundMe, Flook, iSpy, MeetMe, and DoubleDutch (a project that my company is working on). But as of right now, New York based Foursquare and Austin [...]

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, [...]

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 [...]

Hello World! There’s a new data point emerging in social media that promises to change the way that web meets world. Location. Services like Gowalla, Foursquare, Loopt, Google Latitude, Yelp, BrightKite, Flook, Stalqer, MyTown, Rummble, and many more are racing to integrate location to provide deeper, richer, and more social services than what were possible before. [...]