Take all the simplicity and randomness of posting stuff you have or want to Craigslistand add some only-for-mobile features like filters based on proximity, 140 character limits on descriptions, and quick chat to check availability or coordinate for meeting up… and that’s pretty much Anttenna.

From my short experience with the app there is still a fair amount of work to be done to make the service a heck of a lot more user friendly…  like the somewhat unfriendly “Supply Chain” and “Demand Chain” terminology used to describe whether it something I have or something I want. The main page of listings defaults to stuff available nearby, and the list is full of the randomness you might expect with things ranging from a downright spamish offer for $200 rebate on blinds or a queens air conditioner installation company offering… and just a ton of nearby real estate listings with super short descriptions of apartments available for rent.

There is of course a way to filter just what you’re looking for by a variety of factors such as location and category by using the you guessed it ‘filter’ button. Categories include a long list ranging from straightforward things like books and furniture to less straightforward thingslike “items for rent”, “real time dating” and ‘rouse-around” (whatever the heck that may be).  But I think they’ll need to design the discovery process a bit better so it doesn’t take seven clicks to drill down into a category.

In theory the application makes perfect sense… connect the nearby people who want stuff with the nearby people that have stuff, keeping it simple for the mobile device experience yet keeping the power of filters, and added tools such as maps and communications to help improve the process.

Now comes the tricky part of how you take something that makes all the sense in the world in theory and get people to get the app, and post the availabilities of their rouse arounds en mass. 

Many of the things happening in the LBS space right now have a foundation in something that was successful on the web, with a mobile and location aware reinvention of a proven formula. That seems to be the case here with Anttenna as the mobile LBS equivalent of Craigslist, and we’ve seen it before particularly with efforts to re invent the social networking experience in a similar light via players like Loopt and Brightkite and many others. Ultimately I wonder how successful these can ever be.  As new and exciting as mobile location aware services on smart phones are, the total number of folks available to use the services is well below that of the web when services like Craigslist began to flourish online, which gives many of the web leaders in their space ample time to play catch up.

While there were few direct answers here, the read between the lines answer seemed to be that “we’re not sure but we’re experimenting with a bunch of different things”… premium services add-on’s seemed to be a popular option. But it was also clear that regular old banner ads just didn’t seem to be cutting it, bringing in maybe just a handful of dimes per thousand… which when combined with a respectable, but not overwhelming, audience of a few hundred thousand users, wouldn’t amount to much. One of the speakers did throw out that with some of the geo targeting qualifiers, they saw CPMs jump into the few dollars range. Overall it sounded like some of the core economics around the costs of location dips and maps made it challenging to make it work on the pure low network advertising cpm’s model, so CPMs needed to make it into the dollars to make it work.

The moderator of the panel Claudio Schapsis keeps a running tab on all the new location based social networks popping up, and its getting to be quite long these days. Not surprising some of these guys are coming to the realization that it will become tougher and tougher to compete and grow as a stand alone consumer destination, and are instead switching gears to help bring the goodness of location awareness to people who already have large existing networks.