Just a few short hours after we said, “Word has it they are expanding to “everywhere” this month”, Foursquare went ahead and beat our expectations and just announced that users can now check-in from any location worldwide.

Of course, users in new areas will still have to create locations in their city (which still isn’t ideal), but this is a big improvement over what Foursquare was before – a walled-multi-city that not everyone could participate in. Obviously, we anticipate that this move will dramatically increase Foursquare’s usage and appeal.

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. Read the rest of this entry »

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). Read the rest of this entry »

So Twitter has just bought Mixer Labs, the creators of GeoAPI, a location infrastructure service that provides tools and data to people building location related applications; stuff like reverse geocoding (translates lat / long to city name), neighborhood / city lookup, structured data about 16M POIs and local businesses, and more.

I see a couple of different, and non-mutually exclusive ways that Twitter could go with this: Read the rest of this entry »

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 York City.  This was the dream Foursquare checkin scenario – Boxee is a darling of early adopters, and shares   investors with Foursquare.

- My San Francisco based startup recently interviewed ten intern candidates, all iPhone owners.  All between 21-25.  All ten had Shazam on their phones.  None of them had heard of Foursquare or Gowalla.

- At the Treasure Island Music Festival in San Francisco two months ago, there were 33 Foursquare checkins.  This out of about 4000 attendees from San Francisco / Silicon Valley between the ages 18-40.  And if checking in hasn’t busted out of the early adopter crowd in San Francisco, it certainly hasn’t in Philadelphia.  Or Sao Paulo. Read the rest of this entry »

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.