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.

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.

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.