Foursquare is trying the game approach coupled with specials from advertisers that show based on your location.  The ads are tiny, in the upper right as green icons, but it is monetization.  Gaming the system to be mayor is harder than before.  As I stay mayor or a location, do I really gain anything?  Has anyone made business connections?  Has anyone gained followers you can reach by being mayor? Does the number of tokens I receive get me business?

Google Latitude just shows where you are.  Plain and simple. It works across Google Maps on all the platforms and makes no promise to do anything more for you.  I appreciate the simplicity, but know Google has much more planned around Google Ads based on my location soon enough.

Brightkite, one of my longtime favorites, offers a linking of pictures, posts and comments around a place.  But, they seemingly have gotten lost in all the Foursquare buzz recently.  The service is running strong, but I wait for the monetization to kick in as well.

It goes on from there. The point I am getting at (lengthy as I sit down at World Cup with time to think) is how all of these benefit me.  What have I gained by sharing my location?  Is the effort put into broadcasting my location measurable with any return?  or does it drive revenue for the location service itself to sell ads based on the number of subscribers geographically?

So I am asking the location services, new and old.  Show me yours (plan to assist me) and I will continue to show you mine.

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.

1. location service wars
2. privacy statements

Yes, they are both important items, but I feel that the press is forcing me to believe that location services are the big news.  ReadWriteWeb(with over 30 articles on location at SxSW) tried to break the news on CheckIn, (from the makers of Brightkite) to no avail.  Humorously I wrote about this very idea Saturday before seeing the article they wrote.

What I have gathered from all of the news is the sheer madness in the number of checkins, the number of friend requests and the limited consumer side usability of the data. Sites like Vicarious.ly perform a Google mashup of checkins overlayed on the map in Austin.  In about 10 minutes you can’t see the city blocks through all the checkin icons popping up.  Great, people are tweeting like mad and checking in wherever they walk.  What does it do for me?  Will the forthcoming firehouse approach to all this location data give me anything more than a headache?

Should we fall into the trap of helping predict a winner from all of the great, and varied, location services out there?  Do we trust badges? Events? More locations? Games? Better descriptors? More friends that are also users?  I don’t quite know where to begin on any of these options.

With the hundreds of panels down there, where the heck is the rest of the news?

I have no groupings, easy search or other feature for locating just the user I want.  Not everyone broadcasts or has a widget.  Not everyone uses the same service so interoperability is non-existent.

So how do I best query where you might be?  What if you check in when you leave somewhere for privacy?  I am now at a loss to whittle through what are considered close friends, social friends and just followers.  As well as what service any one person might be on.  Could this be the birth of a winner or the death of many of the services?

How well does it really work for conferences like SXSW or Lotusphere back in January?  Everyone is very fluid during the day, moving at a constant pace.  By the time you check in and I check for you, you have moved and checked in again.  Latitude gets the closest in providing accurate and real-time updating as compared to the others.

Where is the value in this form of activity?  Is it in my ability to trace my own movements?  How long should I plan on being at a location before I get the urge to check in?  is there a rule on being in place?  Is there a rule on time before moving?

How do we bridge the location services into something more than an advertising platform for restaurants, bars and vendors to a service we need as people?  Is utilizing the service about a discount or socializing and locating?

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?

_________________________________________________

Brightkite – Still the leader in my eyes, this service adds functionality to location awareness through an iPhone app, Droid app, Blackberry app and even mobile web interface.  While there is no magic mayorship or badges like Foursquare, the integration of comments, Twitter and Flickr make it a win.  Brightkite then raised the bar with their wall application that allows you to specify a place and publish all the checkins, tweets, comments and photos going on at that exact place or a radius.  Tags can also be included.

Notifications of what your friends are doing can be sent via SMS or emailed to you, or simply viewed on the web.  They have a range of security settings from fans to friends and how exact they can see you.  The fans portion follows along the Facebook idea that someone wants to know more about you or find you but you really have not become friends with this person enough to want to see their information as well.

Google Latitude – Google always seems to hint at things to come with each new service, yet slowly rolls them out instead of a big splash.  Latitude has been compared to Brightkite (I myself did some comparisons) but doesn’t quite meet the expectation of the possibilities it could have.  Latitude is full of security settings and icons allowing you to tweak who can see you at what level globally or individually.

One of the key tings to know about Latitude is how it integrates with your Google network and what you are sharing to each individual person.  Establishing levels for the public and trusted friends is a key portion of managing this service.

Foursquare – while it is a location service it is also part game.  You are able to see where someone last checked in (if they allow), but you earn badges and points for finding new places and checking in multiple times.  Not only multiple places but daily but also to the same place over time.  Each week a leaderboard of points is established and people fight to get to the top, for seemingly no reason.

You are able to suggest merges of places that look like duplicates, suggest places have closed and even become a superuser with edit rights over time.  This allows you to change addresses, cross streets, phone numbers and even Twitter id’s of the site.  One benefit that should be extended to mobile users is the ability to tag places as you create or check into them.  This helps grow what you are searching for and makes the service useful on finding places for a topic based on your friend network.  Such as a bar, pool hall or even library that might be close by.

Plazes – a sleeper that has been around for years.  Now that they have been bought by Nokia, when I say sleeper I don’t mean as in closing down.  But as in great promise that is still not recognized.  I have been using them for some time now and had their location service placed prominently on my blog.  There was always a race to be the first to Plaze a new location, but with the numerous location apps coming out they all are losing focus.  One unique item for their service is the ability to check into a place now and even at future times, laying out your location.  If they could tie this to sites like TripIt, it would save me great effort.

Each checkin has a default privacy setting and also the ability to change it upon plazing.  This allows you to control what gets shown to the public and your extended network.  They do have a desktop application, but more mobile interfaces are needed to help it continue to grow.  With the Nokia integration, I imagine we might see more of this soon enough.

Fire Eagle -  I left them for the end since most people don’t know about the service itself.  Backed and started by Yahoo, it is the glue behind many sites that would allow you to check in once and then auto-populate the other sites Much like a Ping.fm for social micro-blogs.  There are many applications that use Fire Eagle and they do have a simple mobile website.

Fire Eagle allows you to hide yourself from all application, and even [purge your entire history.  None of the others offered that from what I read or could find.  Fire Eagle also reads Dopplr to get updates , BrightKite, a desktop widget on OSX, Navison and more.

___________________________________________

So how do you choose which application, much less what security levels?  This is where common sense plays a major role as well as how you handle automatic updating of your location itself.  I follow a simple premise to begin each time I enter a new location service.  I make all location updates manual to control when and if I choose to post.  From there I build my list of friends and decide who gets to see what portion of my location if the service allows it.

Security controls is the most important step as you can sign up for any of the location services.  Many are now requiring, or not telling you up front, they are accessing GPS information in your device and broadcasting it back.

I go by the simple mantra of when I am planning on being in public mode I broadcast my exact location and often.  When I leave that mode I treat my location as private and may not update for periods of time or at all.  Pay close attention to how each service decides to allow granular control on sharing abilities. If there is no granularity, then I suggest only using the service when you want to be seen or changing to a new service entirely.  There are too many opportunities out there to participate in varying services to allow yourself to breach security.

Let me explain further.  A restaurant sees, sometimes accidentally, that people are checking in (via FourSquare or Brightkite or whatever) to their restaurant.  This then shows to their friends and followers where they are and a place they eat often.  Most restaurants get business from word of mouth, not just random stopping by.  So to have those people continue to patronize the location, they offer coupons for that day via Twitter (see my posting from March 09).

Then along comes services like FourSquare that take location awareness to a game level.  By checking into a place often enough, you can become the mayor of the location.  No matter what it is.  Wayne Sutton became mayor of his hotel room in Vegas at BlogWorldExpo humorously.  So the restaurant rethinks some of the strategy and gives free drinks (or maybe a small dessert or salad, whatever) to the current mayor of the location.  The person is there spending enough money and announcing where they eat, so this becomes a frequent visitor/diner card without the card.

How do you, the user, capitalize?  Look for places that have offerings that you frequently visit.  Point out to the owners of some of these local delis, cafes and more about the ability to maximize patronage without extra advertising budget.  Look at what Rizzo Tees in St Louis does via Twitter to drive traffic.  Chris does an amazing job with offers, coupons and specials and has a large following.

Forgot the crazy thought about having a coupon show up as you walk by a place, most of us already have a destination in mind and there is so much more integration to be done there first with GPS.  This side lets the customer be the word of mouth.