• first of all if you don’t already read The Next Web and their coverage of location, you really should…  they did a lot of posts on Facebook Places, full of great insights. I thought the one titled “Why I deleted foursquare for good” was particularly good.  That and pretty much all of Greg Sterling’s Screenwerks blog are great sources of info
• I also saw the re tweet ‘news’ that FourSquare had its busiest day ever in terms of new user signups for Foursquare yesterday. I think this just further supports the thought from my post yesterday that when starting a new company AND a new category simultaneously, that the threat of customers never having heard of you is as big, if not a bigger threat than competitors. Facebook users hear buzz on new location features… go to figure out what its all about… see lots of talk about FourSquare… decide to go check that out too.
• after having played with Facebook Places a little bit yesterday, I am even more convinced that it will be huge. It may take a while for it to truly go mainstream, and I am sure there will be some tweaks along the way, but it’s quite easy to envision Facebook users happily posting where they are en mass in a few months the same way that so many people on Facebook currently use it to say post photos.
• within moments of getting it running yesterday I saw a place update from old high school friends I haven’t spoken with in decades… nothing close to being techy types. One in particular updated that he was “working” at Location XYZ, one click and a zoom later I could see that he was “working” at a cancer center in XYZ city in Alabama… two great pieces of information that I would have never known about this guy otherwise. Now I am not in that area of the country very often nor do I know anyone that has cancer, but its valuable information to have about my friend and who knows when it may come in handy.

I have noticed that my attitude toward when to check in with Facebook is a bit more thought out. When I first started on Foursquare, I found myself checking in a lot more… bagel shop, checkin, gym, check in, playground with kids, check in. The gaming part and brief thrill of mayorship and badges made it fun for a bit. But now with both, I am finding that I only check in when I am somewhere new or noteworthy (relatively speaking of course… no plans to crash the White House State Dinner anytime soon) or if I think others I know may be around.

Now that I know I am pushing check ins out to over 200 people, the vast majority of whom I know and like, well I don’t want to subject them to the fact that I am at the gym or the bagel shop, I really can’t imagine anyone cares. But for some reason I did it with Foursquare for a while. It’s not just about the number of people who I’d spam, but also with Foursquare it felt like it was more about a connection with the place… while with Facebook, it’s more about a connection with my social network.

Perhaps that’s still an angle here to be explored for someone in this space… I won’t check in at my gym or at the bagel shop on Facebook, but I’d still be willing to check in there if there was something that made it worth my effort, it doesn’t need to necessarily be free stuff or discounts but I am not sure a virtual mayorship is going to do it for most.

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.