Location-based services (LBS) have been gaining major steam over the last twelve months, both in usership and in publicity. The idea behind LBS is that users “check-in” to places around their city using their mobile device and friends within your network can see when and where you check-in. The value to the user is an increased connectivity with their close circle of friends. For example, if I’m walking around downtown, I can scroll through my list of friends, see if anyone is nearby, and pop in to have a coffee with them. It’s this idea of serendipity that really piques users’ interest. The LBS viral loop is that the service gets more useful and robust the more friends you have in your network; therefore, it’s in your best interest to recommend the service to as many of your friends as possible.
About a month ago, Techcrunch announced that Facebook would be rolling out location-based checkin functionality for their mobile app, and that it would most likely be dubbed the “Places” tab. Geo-location is all the rage now, with Foursquare nearing 1 million checkins a day and Gowalla at a quarter million users, and while it’s no [...]
Maybe it’s just me, but it seems like while there has been a lot of great publicity about foursquare – all the high-profile partnerships they’ve been signing, teaming up with bing’s maps, huge usership increases, etc. – there’s been a ton of negative sentiment surrounding the location-based social networking service. I suppose it shouldn’t be [...]