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.

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.

Unless you’ve been on Neptune the last few weeks (you’ll need to show us your check-ins to prove it), you’re almost assuredly aware of the iPad, Apple’s supersized iPod Touch. Assuming that Apple will sell millions of these things (regardless of whether people need them or not), and other companies also release portable, multi-touch tablets throughout the course of the year (Lenovo for one has our mouths watering with their U1 Hybrid, and the Google Chrome OS tablet rumors are starting to heat up), tablet computing will be disruptive to a number of online verticals, including we believe, the location space. Here are a few reasons why.

More mobility

If tablets can offer a fair amount of computing power (we’re not sure this is the case with the iPad) they are likely to replace laptops/netbooks when people are away from home/office. Why? Frankly, because they are cooler and lighter. We (Location Meme) accept it as human that people are vain. People are going to want to be seen with their tablet, which means that they will bring it with them when the go out (esp during the day – we doubt many people will be bringing their tablets to nightclubs). Further assuming that given the choice between interacting with the much large screened tablet over their cellphones, people will use their tablets to check-in at a location, which alone will change the location space. But more to the point, when they do check-in, tablets will offer…

Better Interaction With a Location

Let’s assume for one minute that Apple comes to its senses and adds a camera to the iPad (and Steve Jobs willing the iPod Touch). We all know that augmented reality (AR) apps are just getting going, and it is a no-brainer to conceive that tablets are the true future of AR. Crowd a lot of augmented info onto a 3.5″ screen and things get cluttered fast – change that form factor to a 10″ screen and things get a lot clearer and easier to use (not to say that good AR apps can’t exist on smartphones too). There are too many application ideas to list here, but imagine stepping into an IKEA with your tablet, checking in, then then using the tablet to do anything from get directions around the store, to pointing your camera at a couch you like and overlaying different fabric colors onto it, to – yes, the holy grail – purchasing and checking out right on your tablet.

While the above reasons are important, the most important reason that tablets are going to change the location space for companies such as Foursquare, Gowalla, Google and Loopt is…

Tablets will make us more social on the go

Please understand, we are not trying to hype tablets in this post. We see the tablet space as an evolution not a revolution (the iPhone was a revolution) – in fact, as many pundits have noted, tablets have been around for awhile already. But the 2010 tablets (the Twenty Ten Tablets? TTT?) seem to us to be an evolutionary step in computing, especially mobile computing, and every such step in this direction has made us more social on the go. Tablets will allow users to see great looking maps of where their friends and interesting places are, as well as deeply interact with location apps. AR will explode on tablets (once those pesky cameras are installed), and AR is all about location. Finally, and most importantly, tablets will allow us to bring more of the web with us on the go. Apps are great, the more easy and usable access we have to the web as a whole, the more we can truly interact with the millions of websites that don’t have apps, and this above all else, is where tablets are going to change the location space.

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 asses of Foursquare and Gowalla?

My humble opinion is this:

Not really.

MyTown is a monopoly style game in which the properties are businesses in your neighborhood.  Checking in at businesses in your neighborhood earns you coins, which can then be used to “buy” those locations, giving you the opportunity to collect rent when other people check in to those places.

Unlike the other social check-in apps, MyTown encourages you to check in to places without actually going to them.  The emphasis is on the gameplay, not the utility, or your precise location.  The UI is very nice, and the app makes all sorts of pleasing jingling and whistling noises as you tap and accumulate coins.  It’s easy to kill time playing MyTown. But comparing MyTown with apps like Gowalla and Foursquare that are actually about getting off your couch and venturing out into the real world is a bit silly. MyTown could very well turn out to be a big hit with lots of players and a profitable virtual goods business. But the location component of MyTown is more a simple way to customize the gameplay for each player, than it is a hook into the real world. While Foursquare and Gowalla are location based apps with some gameplay, MyTown is gameplay with a dash of location. Their check-in and user data should be judged accordingly.Related articles by Zemanta

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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 the gut.  It’s not a surprise that Yelp should choose to implement check-ins – indeed, check-ins are a perfect extension of local business reviews.  In some ways a check-in IS a review – an implicit endorsement of a local business, in the same way that sales data is a vote of confidence for a product (see Blippy).  And it’s much easier to check-in to a venue from a mobile phone than it is to write a review of that venue.

But what is a surprise is how fast Yelp moved.  To roll out as polished a product as their most recent iPhone release, they had to have begun development months ago.  And the fact that they chose to risk totally revamping a highly successful and popular iPhone app, as opposed to building a separate app, shows just how big Yelp is betting on check-ins.

In the TechCrunch article covering this news, MG Siegler suggests that this development doesn’t necessarily mean lights out for Gowalla and Foursquare:

“No one is quite sure how well the concept of check-ing-in will work when tacked on to an existing social network.”

This is a reasonable point.  Yelp’s social graph doesn’t reflect real life as accurately as say Facebook’s.  And will people share their location with people who are not their friends in real life?

So far, the answer would appear to be a resounding yes.  A quick look on Twitter search shows that people are already using this feature in droves.

A glimpse at the last two hours of data on Twitter search show about 60 Yelp check-ins – about one every two minutes.  Foursquare is claiming a check-in every second.

But the Yelp data is an enormously understated snapshot of the people actually using the feature – it only includes people that A) that have Twitter accounts; B) people who have synced those Twitter accounts to Yelp; C) people that chose to push the check-in to Twitter (the default is NOT to do this); and D) people that have downloaded the Yelp app update.

My guess is that just 24 hours after pushing this update, Yelp is already may soon be closing in on the check-in volume of Foursquare.  And this is before most Yelp users are even aware of the feature.  There has been no Yelp newsletter sent out announcing the feature, and the only coverage so far seems to be on the tech blogs.  What will Yelp’s check-in volume look like when all 1.25M of its mobile users are aware of the feature?

Besides mapping a lot more connections between Yelp users and venues, this new feature is almost certainly going to drive Yelp a bunch more traffic via its Twitter and Facebook integration.  Expect to see Yelp’s traffic get a nice bounce.

But back to Foursquare and Gowalla.  What can they do to avoid being brute forced out of existence?

Here are a couple of options:

- Go international.  How do you say Mayor in Chinese?
– Push the gameplay angle.  Neither Yelp nor Google seem to have any interest in the game dynamics piece of the puzzle.
– Find a niche and focus all distribution, gameplay, and design on that niche.  check-ins for clubbers.  check-ins for coffee drinkers.  A white label check-in app.

I don’t think I’m exaggerating to say that a change in direction may be required.

And as an aside, there is a fascinating food chain battle going on.  Google, who nearly acquired Yelp a few weeks ago, is putting tremendous pressure on Yelp via it’s new “near me now” feature.  Yelp has pivoted swiftly and has quickly added social location to its own service, in turn putting pressure on Gowalla and Foursquare.  How will these tiny startups respond?

So there you have it.  Yelp has moved quickly and decisively into the social location space, and there is almost certainly a lot of soul searching going on in Austin and New York.

Even more than Facebook or Twitter, I saw Yelp as the single most dangerous competitor in the social location space.  And now they’re here, faster than most people expected.  And everybody else is going to have adjust.

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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 based Gowalla seem to be putting together the most compelling combination of momentum and functionality.

Both have early adopter buzz, both are well backed, and both seem to be in rapid growth mode.

I thought it might be fun to compare the two apps head to head based on the following criteria: Data, Utility, Gameplay, UI, Traction, Resources, and Press / Distribution.

Disclaimers: not all criteria are weighted equally and much of my analysis, such as which gameplay is better, is subjective.

Let’s have at it.

Data

After a slow start, Foursquare has been furiously expanding its data coverage to include new cities.  Word has it they are expanding to “everywhere” this month. (UPDATE: A couple of hours after we posted this, Foursquare has opened to include any location worldwide.)

But Foursquare’s 100 cities are no match for Gowalla’s 7,500.  And Gowalla’s data claims don’t seem to be an exaggeration.  On a recent train ride along the East Coast, I made a point of checking nearby locations for both Foursquare and Gowalla.  Foursquare was fine in the big cities, but had nothing in the burbs.  Gowalla was data rich everywhere.

Nod: Gowalla

Utility

Both apps are great for keeping track of where your friends are, and both apps allow you to snoop as to see who else might be in – or might frequent – the same place(s) as you.

On the rewards / selfish interest side, some merchants are starting to give perks to Foursquare mayors, but it’s not widespread enough yet to pay off for most users.

Foursquare earns a slight nod on the basis of its “Tips” – it’s neat seeing comments from people that you know about the places you go.

Nod: Foursquare

Gameplay

While the passport metaphor is clever, the gentle, artsy approach of Gowalla doesn’t resonate with me as much as the competitive, in your face, “I’m the Mayor and You’re Not” gameplay of Foursquare.  It also took me a bit longer to grasp the game elements of Gowalla – Foursquare’s system of badges, points, and Mayors is pretty self explanatory.

Nod: Foursquare

UI

Foursquare’s UI is fine.  It’s clean, easy to navigate, and well laid out.  It just leaves me a little cold.

Gowalla’s UI is shockingly good.  They are able to present more data (e.g. seven lines of nearby business data to Foursquare’s five on the iPhone), and in a more creative way.  And anyone who has used Gowalla knows that the genius is in the little details: the success messages, the Facebook integration, and of course, the impossible number of gorgeous icons they have, for seemingly everything.

Nod: Gowalla

Traction

For lack of a better term, regular people join social media services because their friends are on them.  Foursquare reports more users than Gowalla, and my own experiences support this – I have about 3x as many friends on Foursquare that I do on Gowalla, and the activity feed of each service reflects this.

Nod: Foursquare

Resources

While Gowalla raised more money, Foursquare has top notch investors who would almost certainly be thrilled to drop more cash into the company.  New York is a bigger market, and thus perhaps a more strategic home base than Austin, but Austin is a tech powerhouse in its own right.  Both companies are well connected in Silicon Valley.

Nod: Even

Press / Distribution

Foursquare is a juggernaut when it comes to PR.  A quick search on Google News shows 2,670 news mentions during 2009.  Gowalla shows 43 mentions during the same period.  In the blogosphere, it’s 4819 links for Foursquare, and 1969 for Gowalla.

Nod: Foursquare

Conclusion

So there you have it.  Foursquare gets the not in four of these arbitrary criteria, and Gowalla gets the nod in two.  I see them as even in resources.  Furthermore, Gowalla’s data advantage should be short lived – local business data is available if you have cash, and no doubt Foursquare is racing to drop a ton of new listings into its database.

However, all criteria are not created equally.  As a heavy user of both apps, I strongly feel that Gowalla is a better experience right now, at least on the iPhone.  It’s a little easier to find the place where you want to check in, the Facebook stories look a little nicer, and the UI is just generally more pleasing.  Unlike Gowalla’s data advantage, their UI advantage will not be trivial for Foursquare to match.  It’s hard to make an exceptional UI, and Gowalla seems to have pulled it off, not to mention the icon advantage they have.

So where does that leave us?  It would seem that it’s still anybody’s ballgame.

A few months ago, I believed that Foursquare was on its way to a Twitter like dominance of the social checkin space.  Their momentum and critical mass seemed like it would be enough to overcome Gowalla’s superior experience.  People go where there friends are, and who cares how good an app is if nobody’s on it.  Yet somehow, Gowalla was able to survive Foursquare’s initial burst and build up a large enough user base to create the activity to support the app, and raise a big chunk of funding.

My opinion is that it was Foursquare’s lack of data that gave Gowalla just enough oxygen to make this a battle.  Had Foursquare come out of the gate with global data, this race could have been over.

But they didn’t.  And now Gowalla and Foursquare look to be pretty evenly matched.

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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.

“Simply put, location changes everything. This one input—our coordinates—has the potential to change all the outputs. Where we shop, who we talk to, what we read, what we search for, where we go—they all change once we merge location and the Web.”

- Mathew Honan, Wired Magazine

LocationMeme will be our best effort at tracking and analyzing the companies, trends, data, devices, and entrepreneurs that are shaping our location aware future.

Ready or not, the web is becoming location aware.  Thanks for joining us as we explore this emerging space.