Despite claims of hundreds of thousands if not millions of users across these apps, the vast majority of my friends aren’t using it so it can get a little boring.

Recently I’ve found myself playing more and more with MyTown, last night as I waited for my wife outside Mermaid Inn, a neighborhood restaurant, I had time to check in on all three, but ended up spending 15 minutes collecting rent and upgrading a bunch of business I own on MyTown… frankly I am not sure how much longer I’ll be doing that either but it’s not a bad way to pass 15-20 minutes. And I did take advantage of the special offer that was running on Foursqaare for a free side dish at Mermaid Inn, the restaurant we were headed to anyway… a little surprise free side order of onion rings popping up in your day is never a bad thing. So maybe I’ll stick with it all a bit longer.

On a random technical side note, I did notice that the MyTown geo location feature is noticable more off than folks like Gowalla and Foursquare. Standing on Amsterdam avenue in front of three restaurants Mermaid Inn, B Cafe and Rancho Cafe I noticed that B Cafe was MIA while the other two were right there near the top of the list on MyTown with their little green indicator lights on. After a search I found the restaurant B Cafe, and they had the correct street address, yet still MyTown thought I was nowhere near the place… and it’s not the first time I’ve had to use search to find nearby places on MyTown… definitely some kinks to get worked out there.

I’ve found myself recently thinking alot about all these folks from places like Gowalla, Foursquare, myTown, Loopt.. not to mention the bigger guys like Patch, Google, and Yelp trying to sell in digital advertising to local retailers and some of the challenges they must face. 

On Greg Sterling’s blog Screenwerk he posted a video from a company called WebVisible that speaks directly to this challenge, where many local retailers talk about the various ways they think customer find their businesses (walk-ins and yellow pages types stuff) and then consumers talk about how they really find businesses in this modern age (“the Google” and the Internet). Check out the video below… the bit near the end about one flower shop setting up a page on HappyFace (er Facebook?) is kinda telling. Good luck to the FourSquare sales guys calling on that lady!

Now in the olden days when you just bought a printed foldable map this didn’t really matter much, but nowadays in the modern inter networked world of digital maps and folks creating a dizzying array of new services helping connect people with locations, it matters more.  Now within a single stand alone application like say a TomTom navigation device there is probably not much thought put into what you name a place, but in the web2.0 world where interoperability and information sharing reign, everyone needs to know what location everyone else is talking about when someone is talking about the business at 4151 North Central Expressway.

So rather than just getting everyone to try to agree on a standard, which could take years and years and would probably be a lot like herding cats, Placecast has announced today that it has developed a technological solution to the whole problem and they’re opening it up for free use.

The product is called the Placecast Match API…. and it’s described as “a Rosetta Stone for location data”. For those that need a refresh on their ancient Egpytian artifacts, this basically just means that they will provide a way to translate between the different “languages” that different services use to describe locations for the purposes of enabling interoperability between those services.

There is a great article on Tech Crunch that demonstrates how this problem manifested itself in the hot area of mobile social networking and the battle of the check-ins where folks may want to check in somewhere on a number of different services without having to fire up each service independently and do it manually. Given the viral and social nature of services like Foursquare and Gowalla, I guess it’s not surprising that this is where we’d first see the need for better interoperability between services.

One area where this is particularly interesting is around the area of location based advertising. One of the things that needs to happen to help ramp up growth in this area is more scale in order to make hyper local and location oriented advertising finally get on the radar screen of folks that control advertising dollars. It’s not that there are not a lot of consumers using these types of services today, there are… but usage is spread around among a lot of player.  Consumers may look up directions via Google Maps, Yahoo Maps or Mapquest, others may rely on their Garmin or TomTom devices, while urbanites without cars may just be checking in with FourSquare, Goawalla or Loopt or using one of a hundreds of local discovery services like UrbanSpoon, Yelp, Where, Geodellic, etc.

The amount of traffic to any one hyper local area on any one of these systems is likely not significant enough to create a media buy, but centrally tether them all together with a common reference point and pretty soon you have what begins to look like the beginnings of a network… a point of interest advertising network. 

Putting banners in apps and on wap pages is one approach to the location based advertising opportunity, but there certainly seems to be just as much opportunity if not more around “listings ads” connecting mobile users with the businesses they’re looking for from mobile search and discovery services and then capturing, sharing and aggregating the related check ins at scale across the ecosystem.

I am not saying that this is the Placecast end game, but something like the Match API and other similar offerings by competitors certainly seem like it could help spawn competitors to what folks like CitySearch are doing with CityGrid around the creation of ad networks tied to places.

What will be interesting  is to see how publisher view participating in such a system and the more thorough socialization of content from their system… when the depth, richness and accuracy of that content may be a significant source of unique competitive advantage.

Another up and comer in this area, with a new twist, that is beginning to get some press is a company called Hot Potato.  Here is where they fit in:

What they do: They create an online social network around the dimensions of “here” and “happening now”.  Facebook has people at its center of gravity and Yelp has places (mostly businesses) as theirs. Folks like Foursquare and Gowalla have seen the value of connecting the two with gameplay around the places where people go. 

Hot Potato is similar, but with a focus not as much on the places themselves as on the live events happening either directly in a real nearby place or one 1,000 miles away. Think of it as a mobile or virtual social layer on top of eventful or meetup.com where folks check in to events to socialize.

How it works:  As with Facebook, Yelp, Foursquare and Gowalla, having your friends involved is a key component of the service.  So the first step is to invite all your friends with handy friend imports from Facebook, Twitter and Gmail supported. Once your friends are connected you can kind out what events they’re attending or create your own events and invite others to join you.  Like with Foursquare, people check in to an event in progress and can share comments and pictures with other attendees… events can be open to anyone or made private for only a select group to participate.

I can see this type of tool being particularly good for a business conference where everyone is there to network and share information and to socialize. I tried to set an event up for the Where2.0 conference happening in San Jose this week…  seems that no one found it and a new one was created instead… although even that one had just 16 folks check in and only on posting that I could see.

The Hot Potato service is just getting off the ground, and seems to be in its very early stages at this point, with many kinks to be worked out. The website seems to be down a lot, and I left a question with customer service five days ago about how to set up an event, and have yet to hear back.

For attending real world events at physical places it will be interesting to see if Hot Potato can find enough ways to differentiate itself with features targeting the needs of live event goers maybe around tickets and what to do afterwards. Currently there is not a lot more you can do with Hot Potato than what someone might find checking in somewhere like at Madison Square Garden for an event or at ‘Snowpocalypse’ on Foursquare… with their more loose interpretation of ‘place’.

The service is currently heavily used for ‘virtual events’ around social television watching, like March Madness or the latest episode of ABC’s Lost… making what for many is likely not a very social activity of sitting in front of the tv at home, a bit more virtually social at least. Although it feels like the live and in person events need a different set of capabilities than the virtual event attendance like watching a tv episode, so I suspect that at some point soon, Hot Potato may need to split and decide which market they’re after and how to really differentiate themselves.

Its an interesting enough twist however to continue to keep an eye on.

It’s not that I don’t think local review content is important, really, it is. It’s just that this type of stuff has to have been some of the earliest content on the Internet, I am sure some of the early messages across ARPANETwere something like “took Molly to Surf Shack on Wilshire after switch testing last night, fish tacos were keen”.   It just seems like sometimes it just takes FOREVER to not make much progress in Internet land.

You have to give Yelp a lot of the credit for the current surge of interest, not only is it a pretty valuable service, but the Google + Yelp  deal that never happened,  and now the Yelp business practices lawsuits have kept them on the front cover of the business section for a while now.

So if you wanted to reinvent this baby one more time, what might you do? Well let’s check under the hood of Alikelist. 

First of all, while it’s a horrible name, it does pretty much sum up what its all about, it’s a list of places you like… so in that sense right off the bat its not a traditional review site at all where the general public pretends to be the next A.A. Gill, giving their two cents on every joint in town.  So that’s it, stuff you like in a list… if you want to talk about stuff you don’t like, well go to a different site, not here. 

Beside the fact that its all positive stuff, another important differentiator is that it’s also not about the anonymous general computing public. It’s not just about WHAT comments are being made about the local businesses, but more importantly WHO is behind those comments.  This has always been the shortcoming of existing review sites… you have no idea who is doing the talking, and whether they’re someone you should be listening to.  There are a multitude of features in ALikeList which allows folks to tie back into their social networks to ask for and receive recommendations on local businesses which make this a key component.

Alikelist is a site to discover the places that your friends, family and colleagues like, and to read a little bit more on why they like the places they like. It simply tries to digitize that conversation that must happen a million times a day offline “Hey Bob, I am looking for a good xxx, do you have any suggestions?”… followed closely by “oh yeah, lemme think… well try xxx,  they were awesome.”

The idea and site execution is great because of it’s pure simplicity. People offer up their opinions on businesses online all over the place, but in many ways it’s all become a big convoluted mess, there is not one central place to go look, and there are often hundreds of long reviews written by folks like bigjoe23 to sort through in order to formulate an opinion. Alikelist thinks that a simple thumbs-up and blurb from a more trusted source will nicely supplement, if not trump, hundreds of longer reviews from the bigjoe23’s of the world.

Like with Foursquare and their check-ins, the business opportunity seems to be largely around allowing those local businesses to better connect with their best patrons in the local community, the ones who not only visit their establishments, but who are walking advertisements for their businesses via their check ins and Ilikelist status broadcast out to their social networks.

Well after giving it a bit more thought, I’ve come to the conclusion that the industry needs a more broad “presence at place of sale” (PAPOS?) metric that could capture all the events where a person actually walks into a brick and mortar retailer and that action is recorded by any available means.

The PAPOS could then be looped back into the marketing ecosystem serving as the click or conversion rate for all advertising, both on and offline, targeted at driving brick and mortar foot traffic. When consumers actively check in somewhere that is fantastic, but I think it’s a bit unrealistic to expect this to become a ubiquitous consumer behavior, and it’s certainly not the only way to know when someone is in a retail store. Besides the 100% active way of checking in, there is of course the 100% passive way where your phone location is just recorded in carrier location logs, and many, many things in between like credit card and loyalty card swipes at retail and of course the wi fi and GPS positioning directly in the phone which enables all those great mobile discovery and navigation apps.

I suspect that the active and explicit way of registering PAPOS through check ins will be pretty limited and much will be inferred or recorded through other methods, you’d figure some company will just find a way to throw up 14 million geo fences around all of the retailers of America and fire back geo pixel trackers each time a mobile device enters a place of interest!

A more systematic way of recording PAPOS would go a long way in opening up the world of mobile and local digital advertising… which currently suffers from a serious disconnect when measuring ad effectiveness when they’re looking to drive offline foot traffic… tracking click to call is ok, but how often do you find yourself calling your local McDonalds? “Uh Excuse me, do you have chicken nuggets in stock today, I just want to be sure before I drove on over?”  HA!

As cool as FourSquare is, why stop there… Mr. Best Buy CMO, if you’re listening here is what I think would be a more comprehensive way to use mobile and location data in your business:

First and foremost be sure people can find your stores when they’re looking for them… call Universal Business Listing and Localezeto make sure your complete list of stores and as much information about those stores is correctly propogated out to all the players in the geoweb… oh year and be sure to claim all of your Local Business Listings on Google. 

Want to pull more customers into your physical stores from the web and mobile web? Check out folks like milo.com, where customers can search for items carried in your store on the web and then find the closest nearby store where they can walk in and purchase it then and there… or hire some clever local SEO experts and associated content to create massive amounts of web content around all of your most popular products and tie them back to the location of each of your stores… that way digital searches for “Garmin Nuvi Detroit” lead folks to your brick and mortar stores.  

Want to better understand the people that already come into your stores why not ask someone like Sense Networks if they can drill down around your stores to see how far folks that are coming to your store are traveling to get there, where they go before and after going to your store, or if there is a nearby roadway that could should be driving more traffic but is not… it may be time to buy a new billboard on that nearby superhighway.

Want to help your suppliers and store management better understand what is selling and why? Why not talk with the folks over at Awhere.com to take a deeper dive into the demographics, weather and a variety of other geographically specific factors occurring in the areas around each store that may be having an impact. Not selling many GPS dog trackers at store #2718?  Maybe its because pet ownership in a 50 mile radius of that store only indexes as 28 versus the national average.

Once you’ve got customers in your store why not provide better in store service and create a little mobile store portal to help customers do things like find their way around (Blue Umbrella Indoor Navigation), look up consumer reviews on the items you carry and do price comparisons on items for sale, look at what you have in inventory, and leave feedback for a manager, etc.

In fact, why not just sell virtual digital goods right there in the store through the phone while you’re at it. Why not give Apple a call and remind them about that nifty digital meets physical affiliate marketing patent they filed, and see if you can put it to use by marketing music through listening stations in the store where consumers can download directly to their iPhones while providing Best Buy with a nice high margin affiliate fee for driving the download.

I am sure there is more, but that should be enough to get the ball rolling in 2010.

NYC based Foursquare has undoubtedly been the leader in this area and their success seems to be attracting a lot of imitators.

Here are some thoughts on the importance of check ins and the ensuing pile on we’re about to see of folks adding on the feature.

Why Check Ins are interesting: 

•  for retailers, particularly places like restaurant, their regular customers are the bread and butter of their existence and they need to be well taken care of. For years stores have offered reward cards to reward their customers with their loyalty and repeat business. In one respect mobile check in’s are a modern twist on consumers registering their loyalty to a business… customers that 1. check in at a business often and 2. want to tell all their friends all about it, should be treated like gods by those retailers… not only are they reliable repeat customers, but they’re great marketers for the business as well.
• for the consumer and their social network what you say you do on your Facebook updates is one thing, but what you actually do and where you go is sometimes so much more telling and valuable. It adds another dimension to what people know about you, and what you want to tell the world about yourself. Since its driven from the mobile device, information is both timely and relevant to the immediate world around you, making it potentially more valuable than similar web services which are more like a history book than a telephone.
• having a bunch of strangers write out their opinion on various retail establishments is often valuable, but at the end of the day they’re very often nameless, faceless strangers… you may agree with them, or you may not… if enough nameless faceless strangers are all saying the same thing then the odds are that you may feel the same way as everyone else. But with the check ins and comments tied to your social network, you can take into account who is saying what and can factor in that knowledge.

What would make check ins VERY interesting.

• check-ins develop into the click rate for the geoweb. On the web, much of the advertising economy hinges on getting folks to click through and check out a web site, something advertisers are often willing to pay big bucks for. Within the geoweb, a check-in could be a similar proof of performance for mobile advertising, show them an ad for Sonny’s Restaurant on UrbanSpoon and they later check in at Sonny’s for the first time? That can be priced not too much different than a CPC deal.
• analysis of a pattern of check ins, in aggregate over time for predictive analysis and ad targeting. This is already pretty standard stuff on the web with behavioral targeting capabilities and if you like this you’ll also like this functionality. So it would only be natural to extend this to the mobile and geoweb.

Why in the future, check-in’s may not matter so much

• well theoretically you shouldn’t need to have someone press a button on their phone to tell you that they went somewhere. The technology already in place in the U.s. already knows your location without you having to do anything except walk around with your phone on. Folks like Sense Networks already get access to aggregated location data like this from wireless carriers and use it to allow businesses to make better marketing decisions, no check ins required. I do suspect that there could be a line drawn between the self reported locates and those aggregated and anonymous locations, with the former available for more widespread and individually targetable marketing uses.

It will be interesting to see how things progress between the self reported locates provided by check ins and the just plain looking up location and tying them back to a place.

Anyone can make the functionality to allow folks to check in somewhere, that’s not a big deal, what is a big deal is getting people to actually use it and use it a lot, and then how you make use of the information once you have it.

So when I heard about Yelp adding the functionality I checked it out buried in a drop down menu somewhere, my first thought was well that seems pretty useless, what’s the point of me checking in on Yelp, its a restaurant review site for me, and that’s it, no one except me will know I checked in or care.  There was nothing in it for me to check in.  Now if Facebook added the feature, that could be a different matter… it all depends on how they do it and what is in it for me if they do.

• Consumer don’t mind giving away location as long as they get something valuable in return and they gave permission
• Texting is replacing emailing among the younger generation. Like receiving commercial email, receiving commercial texts is not seen as an intrusion as long as it was relevant and consumer gave permission
• In terms of ad delivery, location provides increased relevance… interestingly no one mentioned the consumer predisposition for acting on advertising when out and about… which I think is probably most important
• Going off and building an iPhone app is not for everyone. It’s expensive ($100k is not atypical) and overall smartphone penetration is not at scale. It makes sense for some demos more than others.  Good old SMS is cheaper, easier and already at scale.

With respect to mobile meets retail specifically one of the panelists Kathryn Koegel from Primary Impact Research made mention of how consumers were often using mobile devices while IN STORE to get additional product information and reviews and to do price comparisons on the items they were shopping for.  On a number of occasions I’ve found myself standing in the aisle at Best Buy, pulling up a browser on my phone trying to find out more about a product that I am standing in front of, so I get it.  It was interesting to see that I am not alone and that this was a potentially unique way to use mobile hyper local marketing more from a customer service perspective than pure lead generation.

It made me think that there is a great opportunity for someone to create a network of individual retail store level mobile sites (via either a geo fence around the physical store, or via a wi-fi access point within store) optimized for the in store customers experience… to aid in finding additional product info, reviews, price comparisons, learn about sales, leave feedback for the manager, etc?

Someone like Foursquare very effectively uses gaming mechanics to get folks to just identify that they’re at a place. But it seems that a mobile retail presence portal targeted to in store customers could get you location (at Best Buy) + intent (looking at reviews of big screen TVs) and potentially intercept some of the high value mainstream local/product search flow at a time when the consumer has very high purchase intent… directly shopping in store.  Seems like a potentially interesting expansion area for someone like Milo, Placecast or Geodelic.

In the long run, Google certainly wants to see the market for mobile ‘finding’ and location awareness to move right along, but I suspect that they never really wanted to directly be in the business of running this application. In 2005 I suspect they instead wanted to motivate other market participants to develop more on this front, and keep Dodgeball as a hedge in case the market didn’t act accordingly… and if this was the case, they were certainly successful as this long list of mobile social networking applications will attest to. Google can now sit back and hope that they all adopt Google Maps as the underlying platform, and all will be fine.

What Google should do now is sell back everything that was formerly Dodgeball back to its founders for some small sum, still take the tax benefits on the “loss”, and let the original founders try to take the service to the next level on their own dime… it sure beats shutting it down and will ultimately benefit Google to have the original innovators working hard to continue to develop the service, and letting them pick up where they left off will move things in the space along quicker than making them start from scratch.

Highly doubtful this will happen, because it will look like a “failure” to the rest of the world, but it makes sense to me.