Why do people check in? Who cares about FourSquare? What is this “checkin” sh%#? Can I have a bite of your burrito? I hear these kinds of questions all the time so I thought I would write yet another location based services blog post to answer. With regard to my burrito, the answer is “no”. I’ve also included a #wouldbeawesome tag in a couple of the sections to make suggestions for additional functionality.

Checking in. It’s nothing more than a tweet with latitude and longitude and an attempt at standardization. Twitter used to be fairly inane before people started to figure out that they had a lot to say in 140 character. Forrester started classifying everyone in Groundswell segments and people got into a whole tweeting-should-be-intellectual thing, but the truth is that we still want to know where people are, what they’re having for lunch and who they are with. Tools like Foursquare, Gowalla, Brightkite and Whrrl do that, but they also have more to offer. In other words, there is more to this stuff than just checking in. Are you using “the more”? Let’s start by finding out why we use this stuff and then we’ll see:

Find Our Friends

The is the most obvious reason and all of the apps do this pretty well. One of the apps has a particular advantage in actually providing you with the friends that are closest. FourSquare organizes your friends first by the city you are currently in so that you can perhaps find people you would like to spend some time with. According to Dennis Crowley, one of Dodgeball’s* primary reasons for being was so that he and his friends could find out at what bars they were watching the (choke) Yankee games. When I was in Seattle, I found this particularly useful because it helped me discover restaurants and bars that my friends like and gave me a glimpse into what their daily lives are like.

#wouldbeawesome
A range of ways to organize by proximity. Let us pick which city we want to watch and the activity in our stream that corresponds. Sorting by time is key and we get that by default, but what about sorting by the people who are closest to wherever we are? If the person is a person I trust or want to get to know I can meet them if they are still there or I can check out a place where they have checked in.

Organizing by lists of friends we want to stalk would also be cool.

See What Happens Next

We want to see if we’ll get rewarded. Badges, items, tips and offers are the reason we focus on a particular app. The gaming aspect of FourSquare seems to have made it the LBS of choice, approaching near 1 million active users. Foursquare has offers for mayors and they have recently released the idea of “specials”. Specials are loyalty plays that allow something to happen at a location based on a check in there, but are not necessarily just for the mayor.

I love that with Gowalla, the potential is there to find items of value randomly. That said, it’s usually not very random. I have only found them at a major event, SXSW. The approach of anyone being able to win is cool.

#wouldbeawesome
Gowalla item adoption. We need some case studies. Heresay [blogging, not journalism] in Austin: One Taco in Austin said they saw a 10 to 1 return in terms of buzz. They said that ten people were coming to One Taco and mentioning that a friend got a free taco from Gowalla for every person that actually redeemed.

I am currently trying to make this happen with a client. Stay tuned.

Make Stuff Happen

Gowalla has the clear edge here. It seems to be based on a the premise of Geocaching which is following a series of clues leading to latitude and longitude locations where you find treasure boxes. The boxes contain a log book and a cool item. You take a picture of yourself with the item and post it to a site to let people know you’ve found it and you sign the log book. Sound familiar? Gowalla has trips. The items are pins and the logbook is a checkin at the site and of course you can take pictures.

FourSquare has 2 different philosophies. Their badge philosophy is a lot more random in the way that it can be achieved. Gowalla’s pins come from hitting specific locations, while most of FourSquare’s are based on hitting multiple locations with a similar theme. They are now combatting this with “specials”.

Marketers need to use the trip functionality. Having a scavenger hunt or quest end up at your restaurant or shop, particularly if there are cool things to do along the way will generate serious word of mouth buzz, particularly with twitter and Facebook integration.

#wouldbeawesome
I would love it if Gowalla plugged into Google Maps or Mapquest and gave me the optimal path to complete a trip. My family and I wandered around Harvard Square this weekend trying to find the 11 landmarks and I was able to find most of them, but I had to look at pictures and look around a lot.

Road rallies. Instead of giving away the location, give a set of clues. People who complete the quest get a pin or a prize. Company sponsored quests would be fun, particularly if they ended with you winning something of value from the company. If the injected randomness along the way like things that let teams skip steps or special prizes, the buzz would be enormous. Trips with grand prizes that have already been given could be marked as such so that people can still play the game, but their expectations could be managed. Road rallies are fun, but tough for people to plan. The beauty of them is that they’re a group activity. The driver can drive while the team figures out the clues. Everyone can check in when they get to the destination. Randomness and fun ensue.

Contextual recommendations. I think most people would like to be given interesting offers based on what they do, but this needs to be done in a fashion that keeps things fun versus getting really noisy. One way would be to add a tab that makes it a choice. This way you can look at offers in the area only when you choose to do so, unless of course you want your phone buzzing every time you check in to let you know there’s an offer nearby. Passive contextual recommendations are tricky because you have to allow the phone to ping the LBS to tell it where you are when you may not want to do so. Dennis Crowley himself said that “passive check in is yucky” but then proceeded to tell us about contextual recommendations, so it will be interesting to see how they do it. Whrrl already has a bit of context letting me know that people who go to my current location often go to some other one afterward.

See What is Happening

This is the stuff I think many people are missing. There’s a lot more than a checkin and a tweet to be had from LBS. The services all provide some level of context in the form of text, tips and pictures. [We are told video is on the drawing board, but scaling concerns worry the founders.]

Once again I missed SXSW music. Aside from WOXY dying, that was basically the year’s biggest crime against indie rock. I was, however, able to get some idea of what was happening by checking the SXSW calendar, listening to live broadcasts on NPR, following good folks like Brad Mays and Mike Leis on Twitter. By using Gowalla, I could see some cool things that were happening at the events as they were happening via pictures:

Broken Bells

Muse at Stubbs

These are a few of my zillions of thoughts on this matter. Your turn. Why else do we use this stuff?