[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.
Though there’s some debate on this point, Foursquare does seem to be pulling away from the pack. That’s why it, and not any of its competitors listed above, was the target of that TechCrunch post and why the New York Times (the actual publication, not even just a blog!) just recently enthusiastically used it as the example to explain location sharing generally. I’ll be doing the same, though the basics of the idea are roughly the same in other cases too.

The process essentially goes like this: A user goes to a place and uses their mobile device to “checkin”. Based on the user’s location as determined by their device’s GPS or cell tower triangulation, the user is presented with a list of venues in their vicinity to select one from as the one they intend to checkin at. This information can be shared with others and the user can choose to receive information relevant to the place they are from the application.

Narrowing in on the Foursquare example specifically, the information that service provides includes “to-do” items (recommended activities) and notes left by other users. There’s also an ongoing game element to Foursquare. The most frequent user to check in at a particular venue is made its “mayor”. This fact is advertised to other users and Foursquare is promoting the idea that businesses give special consideration to mayors as a way to attract customers. Additionally, there are a series of “badges” to earn based on one’s checkins. There are basic ones like 50 total, 4 in a day, 4 days in a row, 3 at the same place in one week, 30 in a month, etc. There are also some more creative ones: 10 movie theaters, 10 art galleries, 10 playgrounds, even 3 places with a photobooth. Both this year and last Foursquare has offered SWSX-specific badges (as specific as attending particular parties) and has created them for other events, organizations, and brands.

All this mayor-crowning and badge-awarding might strike one as somewhat silly and nothing more than a sort of side feature. Well, as far as the silliness goes it’s always important to keep in mind that the FarmVille Facebook game has somewhere around 80 million users. And as far as the centrality of the game components to the service, there are a few things that I believe are significant:

1. It’s a game, and people like to play games—this might be a bit obvious, but it bears emphasis. In fact, there’s a great deal to say about how new social technology (like social interaction generally) incorporates both explicit and implicit forms of play. But that issue stretches far beyond the relatively narrow topic of trends in geosocial networking. For the purposes of this discussion, it will have to be enough to note that given the properly contextualized opportunity to win something—even if it’s just a virtual merit badge for documenting one’s comings and goings on a mobile phone—people can be convinced to want to win it, and even enjoy wanting to win it.
2. It establishes a causal, playful sensibility—If all Foursquare did was tell other people where one is, as opposed to providing the enjoyable wanting experience of a game, it would feel like a utility. There wouldn’t be anything to appreciate about it or give it character. As it is, Foursquare does have a personality of sorts. It’s one that seems to strive to be inclusive and, well, fun. Foursquare’s description of itself on its blog gives a good sense of this attitude: “Your favorite, er, mobile + social + friend finder + social city guide + nightlife game thing.”
3. It shields users for the accusation/feeling of narcissism—This is sort of a specific case of the above. If all Foursquare did was inform one’s friends of his or her every more, it would feel an awful lot like the caricatured version of Twitter in which everyone exchanges several updates about what they eat for breakfast and feels that it’s all quite important. Instead. there’s a goal-oriented aspect to it, even if it’s in the background or comes to matter less over time. Foursquare is a game people can play together, not just another indulgent form of oversharing. Or at least it’s easy enough for one to choose to see it that way.
4. It generates exposure—Foursquare offers users the ability to post updates to Twitter and Facebook. It’s easy to control whether each checkin is sent to those services, or is even made visible to contacts on Foursquare. There’s also an option to have Foursquare send a message out on Twitter and Facebook whenever a badge is unlocked or a mayorship is earned. Once more, a sort of specific case of the previous point: Telling the whole world where one goes each day seems a bit much. Including one’s progress in a game in one’s activity stream is an established practice. This alerts users’ friends that someone they know is on Foursquare, prompting them to consider joining themselves, or at least pushing the needle in terms of awareness and wider adoption.
5. It provides an opportunity for easy and obvious customization and localization—Some of the badges are either location-specific or have specific versions for different cities. Mayorships are also obviously tied to particular locations, ones likely to be recognizable to one’s online social contacts who live in the same place. This helps make Foursquare seem closer and more familiar than it would if it were the same everywhere and thus overly generic.
6. It positions the platform as an affirmative presence, not just a neutral information relay—By being non-generic and establishing itself as having a sort of personality associated with the gaming content, Foursquare has made clear from the start that it isn’t just a switchboard for personal location information or a directory of places to visit. There is a unique and substantive sort of engagement to be had with other users and with the platform itself. That means that when Foursquare makes a deal to include badges for a brand or promotion that it’s not betraying its role as a neutral background facilitating communication. Facebook and Twitter both struggle with the fact that they established an expectation that they be a sort of blank slate for interaction. If Twitter of Facebook sold special powers to corporate users that were not delimited advertisements but somehow incorporated into the workings of the site itself I think there would be significant discontent. The situation is not quite the same for Foursquare.
7. It’s a way to make money—Even if you find the previous point about perceived role to be something of a stretch, there’s no doubt that the game arrangement provides a novel way to involve advertisers/sponsors and encourage smaller businesses to participate in the in-kind exchange of publicity of offering a Foursquare-based promotion like a special offer for the Mayor. Foursquare has already partnered with Zagat, Bravo, Valentine’s Day (the film), Harvard University, and The Brooklyn Museum. A deal with MTV was just announced for “pegging the locations of a number of reality celebs” on Foursquare. Hundreds of venues have have embraced their status as a Foursquare location and are using it to offer promotions. (And keep in mind, this doesn’t have to be the best idea for advertisers in order for Foursquare to profit from it.)

It would be very difficult for either Facebook or Twitter to make their native location functionality (critically, not a third-party application build on top of it) into something like Foursquare’s. Moreover, Foursquare as an idea represented by the components above (which I think covers enough to be innovative in attracting users and making money) can make sense absent offering positioning and location-sharing itself. I could use Facebook to keep my location updated and have that information sent to Foursquare, or the other way around. Not only does this suggest that the location sharing aspect isn’t the “core feature” of an application like Foursquare, but shows why Foursquare only stands to gain from Facebook going geosocial.

The initial report from earlier this month gave precious little insight into what Facebook has planned, but nonetheless seemed to confirm what I tend to expect:

The new location feature will have two aspects, according to the people familiar with Facebook’s plans. One will be a service offered directly by Facebook that will allow users to share their location information with friends.

The other will be a set of software tools, known as A.P.I.’s [sic], that outside developers can use to offer their own location-based services to Facebook users.[...]

One of the people familiar with the project said that the company was not trying to beat the smaller location-based social networks, such as Loopt, Foursquare and Gowalla.

Instead, Facebook wants to go head-to-head with Google in the fight for small-business advertising [Bits/NYT.com]

And what looks to be true for Facebook’s location features is already true for the other aspect of the service alleged to doom the likes of Foursquare: the social graph.

“Social graph” is a useful concept that has become a bit clouded, or perhaps was never made clear enough in the first place. Basically it refers to the map of one’s social connections to other people. The name comes from a branch of mathematics called graph theory, which is appropriately focused on arrangements of pair-wise (one-to-one) connections between points.

In Facebook’s case, all those friendship connections produce one pretty big arrangement of pair-wise connections. And it is indeed an incredible resource that Facebook has access to, but so does everyone else, through Facebook’s API and the Facebook Connect feature of the Facebook application platform.

Foursquare leverages the amazing repository of social graph information that Facebook has built by offering new users the option to link their Facebook account to their Foursquare account to see if any of their Facebook friends have signed up on Foursquare as well. The same can be done with Twitter, and it’s this account linking that enables Foursquare to update a user’s accounts on the other services.

“Find other friends on this service” isn’t new, but the point is that the more that “Facebook owns the social graph” (i.e., the more social connections it maps), the easier it will be for new Foursquare users to discover people they know on the service, making them a little bit more likely to give it a real try and perhaps end up sticking with it.

But in the location-sharing context users very well may not want to connect with or even be discovered by all of their Facebook contacts. As Facebook comes to map more and more connections—not just friends but family and coworkers—it may become more valuable in certain respects but in others it becomes overly broad in scope. And besides, keeping up with the Foursquare exploits of friends in other cities makes less sense than only connecting with local contacts. There are plenty of reasons for one’s circle of Foursquare contacts to be more circumscribed than their list of Facebook friends. To be sure, any future location sharing feature on Facebook will probably (one hopes) have fairly granular privacy settings. But Facebook has become notorious for weighting the scales in favor of making information public (and its CEO has asserted that privacy is dead).

So in the context of the predicted conflict between Foursquare and geosocial Facebook (which has allegedly “already won”), Facebook’s supposed big advantage, ubiquity, is just as likely a disadvantage in that Foursquare and similar services lend themselves to contact networks that are much smaller and specifically defined than one’s fuller social graph as mapped out on Facebook. And, to the extent that Facebook “owns” the social graph, the benefits of that aren’t exclusive and are already being leveraged with success by Foursquare.

The things that differentiate Foursquare form other services—like all those quirky game features—can easily exist on top of a Facebook-based geosocial framework but are very difficult to imagine being reproduced by Facebook itself as a hard-wired component of that platform. Foursquare certainly needs to watch out for what Facebook is doing in terms of geosocial features (and what Twitter and everyone else involved is doing too), but not because it points to Foursquare’s imminent demise. Rather, the rapidly evolving ecosystem of interlinked social services in this category means everyone has to be on their toes.

For example, the folks behind britekite are working on check.in, which aims to be “one checkin to rule them all” after suffering personally from “severe check-in fatigue”, having to separately checkin to multiple services (the image on the “coming soon” site includes britekite, Foursquare, and Gowalla). This raises some questions. Will more than one service send updates to Twitter and Facebook? If not, how will one decide which to give that responsibility to? Will users selectively checkin to some services sometimes and others at other times? Will different services acquire tangibly distinct and only partially overlapping user bases? How will definitions of places or venues be translated for multiple services which may organize locations differently?

While check.in attempts to address the critical mass problem in geosocial networking, other projects are exacerbating it. ShoutEm offers to help you “Roll your own Mobile and Location Based Social Network”. It makes Ning and similar user-generated non-location aware networks look positively naught-eight. Similarly, Socialight, a self-described “read-write API for the world” (empahsis theirs) provides a simple way for developers to build new location-based social applications. Will the the relative ease of creating “the next Foursquare” further fragment the field of geosocial networks? Will check.in cover whatever significant additional services these tools facilitate (if any)? Or will ShoutEm and Socialight be ignored in favor of developing on a location-aware version of the Facebook platform?

Let’s reimagine this line of questioning from the perspective of potential users. “How will I checkin?” “Will I have to checkin to multiple services?” “Who will see when and where I checkin, and how will I control that?” All good questions and all having to do with this suddenly fraught business of a “checkin”.

Now, here’s where we get to the bit about implications beyond location.

It make a great deal of sense that Foursquare offers to send updates about one’s location to Twitter and the Facebook news feed because those are prime examples of “status updating”. That category is a relatively recent one to emerge. At the end of 2009 I wrote about status updating as small, informal, more realtime-oriented, often mobile-based communication disseminated across social networking tools as opposed to “digital publishing”, referring to more weighty content distributed on the public Web for general consumption. Of note then was the fact that according to Pew research, one fifth of Internet users answered yes to “Do you ever…use Twitter or another service to share updates about yourself or to see updates about others?”, double the number from a year ago.

Foursquare and similar services are for sharing updates about oneself and seeing updates from others. So is Twitter (and Facebook, but in terms of status updating Twitter has always led the way). At first, the updates on Twitter and were just some text—famously only those 140 characters. These updates were organized by who they came from and when they were sent. Then more structured data started creeping in, @message and #hashtags became used universally to communicate specific types of information in a standardized way (@ is used to address or refer to a user, # is used to designate a topic). More niche conventions have been pushed, like $ followed by a ticker symbol to designate a discussion of a company from an investment perspective.

All that helps makes Tweets meaningful for machines. A computer can programmatically determine certain things about one’s status as updated to Twitter without “understanding” human language. It might be limited to who and what one is updating about, but that’s something.

Twitter has embedded more data into Tweets as time has gone on, such as information about whether a message is a “retweet” or has been retweeted. Of course, the excitement now is that more location information is going to be embedded too, making that information available for manipulation and analysis by computer applications. Presumably this is what’s going to be added to Facebook news feed items as well.

A Foursquare checkin (or one on any other similar service) is a status update with the emphasis overwhelmingly put on the location metadata component that is soon to be an aspect of the most popular existing status updating platforms, which Foursquare happens to already integrate with to the extent possible. The fact that the location data is structured based on a shared system for correlating points in space with human-significant venues makes it possible for the application to make determinations about who has been where how many times, enabling the badges and mayors. This, along with other features such as tips and finding friends, makes it such that an otherwise contentless status update from Foursquare (i.e., just one’s location as metadata) makes sense and is meaningful where as at the moment I don’t believe a Twitter of Facebook message without any text is even allowed. But that only further emphasizes the point that the Foursquare game could be interfaced with through other sufficiently sophisticated social tools and also gives geosocial networking sufficient content for location information to be substantive in itself.

But location isn’t the only sort of information that could be programmatically associated with a status update. Miso is an extremely Foursquare-like application, it even has its own set of badges, for checking in to share what TV show or movie one is watching rather than where one happens to be in the world. Badges reflect number of shows or films watching in a particular genre, completing a particular series, watching enough things about vampires, etc. There are many.

A little message can be included upon checkin (”checkin” is their own word choice), so it’s like sending a Tweet about what one happens to be watching. Except this way the watcher can see who else is watching the same thing, or what their friends are or have recently watched. And like Foursquare there’s an option to send one’s Miso update to Twitter and Facebook, meaning there’s no loss to using Miso in applicable cases. There’s even an option to update Foursquare as well, with location information and all!

Then there’s stickybits, which also allows linking to Foursquare but is focused on scanning barcodes with one’s phone and attaching (”sticking”) text or other media (”bits”) to them. To be honest I’m a bit fuzzy on how the location aspect plays into the barcode scanning but the point remains: more layers of structured data on top of each status update/checkin.

And speaking of layers, there’s already an application bridging Foursquare and Layar, one of the most popular open platforms for augmented reality development. There have already been some great deployments of augmented reality technology on mobile devices, but as structured location information becomes more effectively linked with social information entire new possibilities start opening up. I could even see a live overlay of where people had checked into Miso as watching my favorite show if I really wanted to.

It’s important to put it that way: it’s where people had checked in. Who knows where they are or what they’re doing now? There’s no requirement to checkin everywhere one goes just like there’s no requirement to Tweet about every action one takes. Nothing about these applications inherently invades privacy or forces oversharing.

This perspective would seem not to be shared by the creators of Please Rob Me, a sort of stunt Web site that critiqued location sharing for letting it be known that one wasn’t at home to defend one’s belongings from theft (the “project” has since concluded, coverage from the time it was more active here). However, Foursquare’s response to this episode quite elegantly emphasizes my point:

The question of “Will foursquare get my house robbed?” is really a bigger question about the pros and cons of location sharing in general. The site that kicked off this whole conversation was using Twitter’s Search API to pull in foursquare checkins that had been sent to Twitter and was then re-wording those tweets to advertise the fact that a user wasn’t at home.

The truth is you could make something like this without using foursquare at all. Just try searching Twitter for the words “headed to”…

http://search.twitter.com/search?q=%22headed+to%22

… and you’ll start to scratch the surface on all the location data a lot of us push into the internets, perhaps even without thinking about it.
Anyway, we definitely “get” the larger issue here – location is sensitive data and people should be careful about with whom and when they share it. And at foursquare, we do everything we can to make sure that our users know with what people and social sites they are sharing their location with. [...]

That being said, figured I’d share one of my favorite comments from this Gawker post poking fun at the whole “foursquare as robbery accomplice” angle:

You might as well argue that you should never tell anyone that you have a job, because then people will know you are at work from 9-5 every day, and can use the white pages to find your home and rob you! Or that you should never, ever update your Facebook status to let people know you’re on vacation. Or that you shouldn’t blog that you’re at work, or at a restaurant, or in another city, or anywhere other than home. Or that you should never upload mobile pix to Flickr when you’re out at night. Or for that matter, you should never, ever, ever tell anyone that you’re anyplace on the phone, because you know who may be listening in? Robbers! Robbers who want to steal your precious, precious, precious shit! (by mat-honan)

(Probably not necessary to quote all that, but I feel Foursquare’s choice of quote is worth including.) Location can be shared on Twitter without Foursquare. Location can even be shared on the Web without Twitter. And somehow people even knew where to find each other before that.

The only thing new here is that all this information about where people are, what they’re doing, what they think, what they’re watching, and more is getting more structured and arriving in greater volume and at greater speeds.

Earlier this month Twitter announced that it was turning on “the firehose” for a group of new partner companies—that is, giving them API access to the realtime stream of new Tweets. That’s around 50 million each day. Google and Bing already had access to all those Tweets so they could be indexed for search. Google is moving on towards indexing all new Tweets in realtime. It’s one thing to get those 35,000-some messages each second sorted and queued up for analysis and then plugged into a database, Google is talking about making new content on Twitter searchable the instant it’s put there. More and more of those Tweets are going to start coming with location metadata, and maybe other sorts of structured information embedded in their content (@, #, $, perhaps standardized identifiers from other applications, etc.). That’s a lot of usable information.

Superfeedr, a company I’ve written about before in the context of the realtime (as in, to the second) Web, has started including location in data feeds. In that previous post about Superfeedr I wrote:

Think about all this really realtime stuff along with the location-based social services like Foursquare and the rapidly improving world of augmented reality, and you can start to see the outlines of what the next generation of the social Web might look like. It’s one where a mobile interface with the realtime Web is sufficiently advanced that one doesn’t need to be deliberately accessing the social Web to be a well-timed participant in it, and as a result the Web more easily folds together with ongoing “offline” day-to-day activity.

That was two months ago. Almost all of the posts I’ve linked to about developments on this front are from the intervening several weeks. I don’t think I was totally off my game back in January (a fellow from Superfeedr even left a very nice comment), so everything would suggest that what I described as outlines are getting filled in pretty quickly.

Even more dated than that post of mine is that innocent TechCrunch post I used as a straw-person. Recall its two assumptions that I wanted to address:

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

I hope they already look more unreasonable than they did back before the jump. But a last thing on the first point: Consider that Twitter’s tipping point SWSX saw the total Tweets reach the dazzling height of 60,000 per day from its previous average of 20,000. By contrast, Foursquare is pushing 350,0000 and racked up 100,000 new users over a ten day period ending last week. Foursquare’s improvement over Twitter’s take-off performance suggests that friction around the adoption of new forms of status updating is decreasing.

And just to reiterate on the second point: Sharing information about location (or anything else) isn’t what’s new or interesting. What’s new and interesting is sharing that information in a well-structured fashion that facilitates new applications and experiences.

I don’t know how Miso and stickybits are doing. I realize that they’re certainly not putting up the big numbers just yet. But “location sharing” in the second point could be replaced with “television/movie watching sharing” or “barcode content tagging sharing”. I’m not saying that either thing is poised for vast success in the short-term, but to simply assume that they’re not ignores everything that could be done on top of the basic infrastructure they employ—everything Foursquare has done on top of basic location sharing, for instance.

More realistic than either of those two examples might be an ever so slight twist on Foursquare’s “where are you?” promt. Plancast is, according to one of its founders, “Foursquare for the future.” It asks “where will you be?” What strikes me as rather funny about this example is that we’ve actually had structured data formats for events for quite some time. But the iCal/Outlook/Google Calendar world of appointments doesn’t fit with the checkin-esque model because it’s designed to be primarily closed. At the very least, there’s no shared space out there that everyone can throw (er, cast) their upcoming plan into. Not insignificantly, I think this becomes intuitively clear as soon as one sees the big buttons for signing in with Facebook or Twitter. And just as Foursquare could live alongside Facebook location features, Plancast already is introducing integration with the Facebook events system.

Aside from precisely not being crowded out by overlap with a big competitor and not being quite reducible to its core technical function, what does Plancast have in common with Foursquare? That the goal is to combine the ease of sharing relevant social information through a simple status updating tool with the power of doing so in a structured way that can be usefully processed by computers for new applications.

Neither “structured data status updating” nor “checkin-esque” are particularly strong coinages, but I think either will turn out to be a better descriptor of the category of services that includes the likes of Foursquare than “geosocial networking.”