Check-in Services
There are a variety of applications that take different angles and create different experiences for location-based check-ins. The more well-known social location apps include Foursquare, Gowalla, Google Latitude and Loopt. Others include Brightkite, MyTown and Whrrl. With Foursquare, which recently reached 2 million registered members, users check in at various businesses and locations and compete for points and to become mayor of those venues.
Gowalla takes a different approach, encouraging users to discover their friends’ favorite places and creating a list of locations grouped into “trips.” MyTown creates a Monopoly-like game by allowing users to purchase real-life locations and collect rent when others check in there. New location-based apps range from EchoEcho, which allows you to let specific people know where you are at a certain time, to OK Magazine’s Celeb Spotter app, which facilitates the stalking of celebrities. Apps like Loopt and Google Latitude automatically track your location on a map and allow your friends to see your location info. Yelp currently allows people to check in at venues, which is a smart addition to its already strong database of restaurants and other businesses. There are even apps such as Avoidr, which are built using Foursquare’s API and allow you to see where your enemies are in hopes of avoiding those locations.
In the newest version of SCVNGR, a more gaming-focused app, users can create their own challenges, allowing users to design the game for themselves. One example of a challenge: Check into a burrito shop. Carefully unwrap your burrito and create an origami sculpture with it. Snap and upload a picture for two points.
Although these services are growing in popularity and use, thanks to the growth of smartphones, the number of users is small compared to the overall population. According to a Forrester study, only 4 percent of online adults in the U.S. have ever used location-based mobile apps, such as Foursquare, and only 1 percent updates these services more than once a week.
However, that number is expected to grow dramatically with Facebook’s expansion into the location-based check-in arena. Facebook announced recently that it’s creating its own check-in system, Facebook Places. You can check into a place and tag people who are with you, as well as see who else is at that place. Facebook Places lacks the competitive aspects of services like Foursquare, but opens up a variety of other possibilities since it will be integrated with Facebook’s existing platform. Facebook will also integrate existing check-in services such as Foursquare and Gowalla.
Giving our location information to Facebook opens up a wealth of privacy concerns about how the site will share that data and how it will profit from the data. With 500 million registered users – 150 million accessing the social network through their mobile phones — Facebook is destined to become a major player in the location-based advertising and marketing world.
Another major player is, of course, Google. The number of check-in apps will also continue to grow thanks to Google’s new Places API. With the API, developers can build apps that include a “check in at this place” feature. This Google Places data may help developers create check-in apps for far less cost. However, as with all free Google services, there is a catch: These apps must be integrated with one of Google’s advertising platforms, Adsense. Google Buzz also allows location check-ins. Although Buzz has not taken off, the upcoming Google Me social network is expected to include location check-ins.
