When Foursquare launched the leaderboard was the place to see how you ranked against other early adopters.  You often did not have a long or strong friend list to compete against and badges were very new.  Swarms were hard to come by.

Now badges are gaining traction with some even competing for the number of accumulated badges.  Points are slowly becoming obsolete.  I want Foursquare to stay ahead of the pack and deprecate points and begin placing better partners and perks.

The AMEX weekend for small business was a marketing hit.  Coupons at local restaurants is a huge bonus and keeps people coming back.  Rewards for verified mayorships are harder to find and should be a growth area.

What I need from a location service is the building of recommendations built around my learned check-in behavior.  Learn the tags of types of places, areas they are in and begin expanding my circle.  Pick something outside the normal radius, suggest adjacent type tags of foods or activities.

Become not only a place for me to say where I am, but a place to look for the next place to visit.  I use Foursquare to not only announce my location for on the fly meet-ups, events or fun, but I began long ago to use the service to place markers on places I really liked and want to visit again in the future. (I wish they would buy sub-services like Foodspotting to match what I like at the locations I check into).

Foursquare has become an event logging, taste building and location service.  I am only giving suggestions to maintain the growth and usage before something else comes along that scoops that part up.

So many still ask, what’s the point? I simplified it like they do on the About pages. Instead of reading through reviews looking for the best entire restaurants in your city, this serves up the best dishes. The best of everything in any category. If you want to eat only the best pasta, salad and then a dessert, who says they have to be at the same restaurant?  Foodspotting lets you see the best dish in any given area using your phone GPS.  From there you can search, see what your friends like and more.

Of course, they were smart enough to forge some form of game into the system to help make it addictive.  You can become an expert on specific food groups/types (and be known as an excellent photographer as well) and build Noms on the foods you find that others want or say they like as well.  You can get marks for a great find or great shot.  Commenting and more also appear.

Google Maps is built into their homepage and new finds pop up on the map, even before you log in.  From there you can narrow by location, category and friends.  They added widgets for your blog/website to expand their reach.  The team at Foodspotting even took the next step to integrate Foursquare.  So when you find that dish, go ahead and check in at the same time.

Lists of most active users, top users and more can be easily found.  You can connect to Twitter, Facebook, Flickr and Instagram to share as well as find friends from those networks.

In essence they have done all the basics right, from the start.  I enjoyed the responsiveness of the team before and during the beta and look forward to what they have in future releases.

Look for the app on iPhone/iPod/iPad and Android.

The goal is to make using the service more valuable through a grassroots effort to target businesses.   When the business signs up they can claim their location to begin seeing statistical information about the check-ins at their location.  Want to see the peak time of day people check in, it is there.  Read more about it and if you are still not a Foursquare member, sign up right here, right now.

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So this brings the question of how your company expands your offerings?  Do you build a social program to get grass roots effort involved in expanding your business?  Are you visible on the web as well as through word of mouth?  Do you garner support from other companies trying to use your services?  These are steps that help drive the ecosystem.

Have you developed a program that excites the community to evangelize your products?  Are there rewards? Praise for the investment of time and energy?  These all become part of the plan to mobilize a local group to reach out.  I sat back at Lotusphere 2011 last week as they introduced Social Business.  I now wait to see how they get me excited about evangelism.

After crunching the numbers of all the new locations and the delta change between the main venues, we basically broke ~2500 total check ins.  I did not include the restaurants like ESPN and the Big River Grill due to so many other tourists.  Instead I focused on all the brand new venues that were created and the ones I didn’t map and you took upon yourself to do.

Many of you checked into the main venue of Lotusphere 2011, by far leading the pack.  The bars, rooms, dining hall and more were all over the map.  As expected, the smaller meeting rooms got less.  We could have easily had some of the upper swarm badges, but we needed everyone to start checking in.  Word of mouth with the college students alone would have sealed the deal.

So thanks to everyone.  I learned some important lessons along the way once again and keep streamlining the process, ability and locations.  Send along any and all comments, tips or ideas so I can plan early.

So the question remains and I was constantly asked, why Foursquare?  Let me summarize the choice to use them for this event.  They offered a multitude of client support across devices.  I had a team making other products that wanted to integrate.  I was granted some stronger levels of power by Foursquare to edit, merge, create, delete and more.  It made making them all so simple.  I knew pictures were coming.  Granularity was easier.  I believed in checking into a room rather than a session itself.  You could always shout the session name and title.  Integration with numerous other applications, like Foodspotting, was there.

The list goes on.  I just wanted to share a huge thanks and let everyone know what a success it was.  Stay connected if you want.  It is purely optional and it will be back for the fourth year at Lotusphere 2012.

Brightkite was a leader in the check-in space.  Competition came along just as any industry evolves.  Soon the media was measuring, weighing and comparing capabilities.  Brightkite consistently won early charts.  But something shifted.  Mass media help drive consumers one specific direction, shutting out specific players.  The press started reporting on mainly one or two location services only.

Brightkite suffered a final blow when two founders left for another startup launch.  Leadership lost in this market can be the demise if they were some of the brains behind it.  I am not saying the team there is not talented.  It would be much like Zuckerberg leaving Facebook or Dennis leaving Foursquare.

So what do you do when the space for free location services gets too crowded?  You emerge again with a new business plan and untapped market.  I am not saying that group texting is something needed in the market.  Most phones allow this ability natively.  (Yes you must specify everyone each time, but it is there).  Even Blackberry with the new Messenger version has groups that allows chat, pictures, calendars and more.

Does the relationship that Foursquare and Gowalla share with businesses impact the promotion?  Definitely!  It was something that Brightkite never went after.  Some inherent form of business relationship to drive a larger userbase while still having media appeal.  Brightkite was first, in my eyes, with pictures, walls to track check-ins by location (not jsut person) and more features.  They still have the underlying technology that many of these other players should be interested in.

I bid a fond farewell to the check-in service portion of Brightkite and wish them the best in the group texting market.

Connect with me on Foursquare or Gowalla for now.  I hope to soon add Tri-Out to that list..

Note: You can go back and see how often I write about location services, I believe they have a place in marketing, consumers and social media.  I hope they continue to evolve and compete.

• setup
• account management
• options
• the interface

and more in this less than 8 minutes.  Learn what I think and if it is worth you switching your existing client to.

Remember, you can find me as IdoNotes across all the networks

• Does anyone care if I was in a swarm, visited Mount Rushmore or can administer CPR?
• Do we have to get jackets or sashes that we attach these digital badges to?
• Do you visit the pages of your friends to see what badges they have, or do you use some client just to see where they check in and have no clue what they earned?
• Can I get free services, coupons or discounts for having specific badges?  This isn’t mayorship, just an icon.

I begin to feel we reached a peak in the desire to achieve such things and are looking for true value in the services we are using.  Badges inherently were built for kids as a sign of learning and have now turned into a game with no winner.  Each time you get close to having all of the possible badges, new ones are announced.  The game never ends.

It becomes like a RPG that adds levels every time someone conquers all there is.  I have a badge for all of the sites giving out badges.  But it wouldn’t be appropriate.

After you create an account, it prompts you to allow them to authorize them using the Foursquare API and read your stream of checkins.  From there, it will tell you how many checkins you have at a location, who the mayor is and how many more you should need to steal the title.

You can even search for a particular site if you have your eyes on being mayor there or if they are running an upcoming special.  All thanks to When Will I Be Mayor.  It was interesting to see how far behind I was in certain spots and how far ahead in others.  So using it in reverse let’s you know who is creeping up behind you as well.

I have written recently about how Foursquare has failed me, and this does not detract or add to that.  It is just a good implementation of the API to show how mayorships works inside the game known as Foursquare.

There is no quality control in making, duplicating and creating locations.  This is derived from individuals not wasting the time to correctly search and match a location, to network failures that don’t show results with prompts to create even more.  Seriously, do you really, really think no one has even been to that airport and checked in?  No one?

Then we move into the micro-location placements.  I read an article where Denny, of Foursquare, was paraphrased in saying that it is part of the fun when referring to creating these new micro-locations.

A micro-location (by my new definition) is small places within large check in points.  For example gates at an airport.  I can buy in the to the idea of doing that after you check into the airport itself due to the airport size and letting people know exactly where you sit.  However, which of the 5 airport listings did you get back in your result and how many variations of the gate are there now?  Shouldn’t “gate A7 at Stl” be matched and forced somehow into a single listing of “STL – gate A7″ and the other “A7 gate at Lambert” and maybe “Lambert gate A7″.  Oh the list goes on.  So much more.

A location service basing monetization needs controls of the data itself before moving ahead.  How can you guarantee people are using the one where you offer the free drinks or discounts?  What if two exist?  Who won?  How do I advertise?  How do I track results?

This adds to the overall complexity in the sheer number of location services fighting to be on top.  Or to get purchased and sucked into some major network.  I still use the service, for no other reason that people look there to find people.  However, I am losing value in the visits myself as the user base grows.  Even being a Level 1 Super User has me spending far too much time cleaning up others mistakes to simplify my later check-in experience.

The point made was that while they like the history of where they visited and even the game of being “mayor”, the idea of someone knowing exactly where you are was disturbing.  Knowing where they were was just fine.  It still provided the level of sharing locations while adding a level of pseudo security by placing a time delay in someone seeing the check-in and walking out the door.

I contemplated over the weekend just how this affects not only the usage of the services (Foursquare, Gowalla, Brightkite, Latitude, Loopt and whatever), but the privacy concerns that aren’t addressed.

In usage, the goal of the services is to show where to are to presumably draw a crowd, establish a pattern in your visits and take some virtual ownership of that place.  While Foursquare seems to be taking advantage of this by getting restaurants on board to give freebies or discounts away to mayors and the others provide notes and pictures to be loaded in, the real value relies in knowing your habits, travels and preferences.

The jumps right into privacy.  I thought about spitting this to SocialStalking, but the reaches are much farther.  How easy do we make ourselves a target in both the real location where we are and noting when we are not at our place of residence?  Is there any legitimate fear in allowing people to know our location down to the few feet via GPS coordinates?

The race of early social network adopters was to enable sharing to as many friends as possible until we realized just how much data we were sharing to seemingly virtual friends.  While many choose to check-in manually, many still turn on full automation through their phone GPS.  I prefer to manually check-in to only create a history of visited places or to mark a specific restaurant I may not want to forget.

How do you handle the check in process?  Do you do it when you arrive or when you walk out?