[NOTE: Significantly updated from an earlier version published 3/22/10]

There is a great deal of talk at the moment about location-aware/location-based social media applications—a fuzzy category that Wikipedia has helpfully established a name for, geosocial networking.

In short, these are all services that allow their users to submit information about where they are and share that information with their contacts. Many features extend out from that: reviews of local establishments by other uses, recommended nearby activities, friends who might be in the same area, even forms of group game playing.

The big standout here is Foursquare, which launched just about a year ago, right before the 2009 South by Southwest (SWSX) Interactive conference. They’ve been growing at an almost Twitter-like pace recently, earning them comparisons with Twitter, including that the 2010 SXSW could be a breakout moment for Foursquare the same way many people think of 2007’s conference as for Twitter.

Gowalla is the alternative most often cited as Foursquare’s best competition—when both companies released an update for their mobile apps just before SWSX some started calling that week “the battle of location based apps“.

Brightkite is also often part of the discussion. There’s also Loopt, Whrrl, MyTown, and a few others that seem a bit like also-rans at the moment but may yet surprise. Google has Latitude, Yahoo has Fire Eagle, and the review site Yelp has launched location-based features too (though Foursquare feels Yelp’s version is a little too similar to their own).

Though the past year has seen an explosion of activity in this area, it’s not new. The first service on the scene was one called Dodgeball that was founded way back in 2000, got acquired by Google in 2005, and was turned off in 2009 to be cannibalized into Google’s Latitude. Dodgeball’s founders left in 2007, with one writing that their experience at Google “was incredibly frustrating for us”, and proceeded to create Foursquare (perhaps explaining the name a bit).

These services are all interesting and there’s a lot of potential in this area, but so far the number of users has been fairly low and that population has been fragmented across different services. Foursquare is getting the bulk of the attention because it’s starting to build momentum (I, for instance, finally have started an account).

But it’s not the specifically location-focused tools that have made the biggest geosocial news recently. Two services that make Foursquare and friends look like ants are joining fray: Facebook and Twitter. The somewhat dodgy details on Facebook’s potential new location sharing features come from the New York Times’ Bits blog. Twitter announced their new capabilities on their own blog. Location-awareness isn’t entirely new for Twitter (one of Twitter’s early partners in geotagging was in fact Foursquare), so it’s the reporting about Facebook that’s making the biggest waves.

And not without some justification. Facebook will probably end 2010 with at least half a billion people. In comparison, Foursquare is still under half a million. Even more importantly, Facebook’s appeal is both broad (users cut across demographic categories and areas of interest) and deep (some spend several hours a day on the service and reportedly half visit the site every day). That means Facebook has the opportunity to expose location-based features to a wide variety of users and that many of them are already heavily invested in that particular site. That’s a much stronger position than having to be sought out by users and requiring them to register and start using a whole new service. These are some of the arguments made in a post on TechCrunch from a while back titled “Watch Out Foursquare, Facebook is Poised To Dominate Geo”, which includes the subhead “Why Facebook Already Won”:

Unfortunately, most people don’t know all that many people on Foursquare yet — my current Friends List on Foursquare is dominated by folks who live and breathe tech, without a single person from my ‘regular’ social circle on the service. Twitter has always suffered from the same problem, and even a year of stellar growth and constant press attention hasn’t yet given Twitter an on ramp into mainstream use.

“Regular” people don’t use Foursquare (or, apparently, Twitter), they use Facebook. So, because Facebook already “owns the social graph” (i.e. “knows who your friends are”) Foursquare and others can’t rely on location as a core feature:

If Facebook does nail geo, that doesn’t necessarily mean Foursquare is doomed. It just means that Foursquare needs to build a product whose core value extends beyond showing where your friends are…Facebook is going to own the social graph, but there’s plenty that can still be done beyond that…They’ll just need to figure out how to use location as a starting point, rather than a core feature.

The argument put forward in this post reflects more widely held incorrect assumptions about both the direction of the social Web generally and the geosocial category specifically:

1. That user inertia and the presence of a big competitor (like Facebook) mean new sorts of social networking tools can’t attract enough users to cross over into the mainstream
2. That the “core feature” (and not starting point for other capabilities) of applications like Foursquare is location sharing with friends, and that’s too limiting and potentially too foreign a notion for them to thrive

Both of these merit being dispelled . Doing so will require getting into more detail about what these geosocial applications actually do as well as how they work. That perspective will also help highlight that the important take-away from the current flurry of activity in this area is about much more than just location.
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