As we all know by now, comments on the Internet are a fascinating thing. My favorite involve the word “fanboy.” Generally speaking, it means you write (stories, tweets, whatever) about a certain topic with a positive angle. It’s meant to be derogatory, but the truth is that it’s so overused that it’s almost completely meaningless. But for the sake of this post, I’ll play ball. I have a confession to make: I’m a fanboy.

Now, I didn’t say specifically what I’m a fanboy of, because there have been too many titles bestowed upon me over the years. At various points over just the past few months, I’ve been an Apple fanboy, a Google fanboy, a Twitter fanboy, a Facebook fanboy, a Foursquare fanboy, a Gowalla fanboy, and yes, even a Microsoft fanboy. Never mind that most of companies compete with one another, so it would be hard to be a true fanboy of multiple ones without misrepresenting your fanboydom of a few of the others. We’ll just say I’m a fanboy and leave it at that. And that leaves me wondering: why wouldn’t you want to be a fanboy?

To me, the diluted version of the term means that you’re passionate about a certain technology. And isn’t that why any of us do what we do? Sure, you’ll throw the term “objective journalism” at me, but what does that really mean? Is any journalism truly objective? Every human being has an opinion one way or another about everything. Objective journalism is simply the practice of suppressing that opinion. For certain news fields, like politics, I see the value in that (at times). For technology, I’m not sure that I do.

If I’m reading about a new technology, I want to know what the author actually thinks. Take a new tech product for example, I want to know if an author thinks it’s any good or not. Or a new startup — same thing. Or some move a big technology company is making. It’s all the same. If I wanted a completely objective take on the story, I’d read the press release or the spec sheet. Actually, no I wouldn’t. Those are usually more full of bullshit than even the most biased reporting (wait, my laptop is supposed to have 12 hours of battery life on a single charge — it says so right there).

Others will say that the term fanboy doesn’t just mean you love something — it’s that you love something and are unfair against its competitors because of that love. That’s the only way I can explain the angry comments when I write posts with the headlines “An iPhone lover’s take on…” “Your bias is obvious!” the commenters will shout. Well yes, I put it in the title. How observant.

But that’s the funny thing about being a fanboy — you can be a fanboy of anything. You can switch your alliances at a moments notice. There is nothing tying you to the love of a certain product. As I’ve written numerous times before, in the 1990s I would have been called a Microsoft fanboy — I loved Microsoft products and hated Apple ones. Today, I’m called an Apple fanboy. Times change. And they’ll change again.

As always, my only requirement for being a fanboy of a product is that it has to (in my mind) be the best. Right now, in some cases those are Apple products. In some other cases, those are Google products. In some other cases, it’s Twitter. Etc…

Angry commenters seem to want to believe that you can’t actually just like a product. There has to be some ulterior motive. Either you’re paid off, or you’re just blind. Or both. It’s simply an easier (non) argument to make than having an actual discourse.

Make no mistake, those people are fanboys too — but worse. They feel the subject of their adulation is under attack, so they become rabid. But I’ll repeat that I think overall this is a good thing. Balance and all that.

In closing, let me state again for the record that I’m fine with the fanboy label. Apple fanboy, Google fanboy, Twitter fanboy, etc — those are all appropriate and welcomed. But it may be easier (and less contradictory) to just say that I’m a fanboy of good products. And I always will be.

[photo: flickr/terryjohnston]

Yesterday, Robert Scoble wrote a post about “Foursquare’s Yelp problem.” It’s an interesting read, with some good thoughts about how Foursquare can withstand feature-copying from a much larger rival. He asked for my thoughts, so I figured I’d jot some down here. Most importantly, his post got me thinking about the next phase of location, which I think we’re just about to enter.

First, Scoble’s thought that Foursquare might be in trouble because Yelp copied its check-in badge idea seems a bit premature to me. It was a much bigger deal when they added the whole check-in concept back in January, but the fact that Foursquare has started growing faster than ever since that point shows they have an advantage over Yelp in the realm. That advantage is that they have a social graph built for location, Yelp does not (yet).

As we all know, Yelp was built as a rating and review system for local restaurants. It has a social graph, but most people on it are connected to other people because they’re interested in their food/restaurant reviews. It has nothing to do with wanting to see which of their real friends are nearby (which is what Foursquare is all about). That’s why I think it would have been smarter for Yelp to partner with Foursquare (or Gowalla, or Loopt, etc) in the same way a service like Hot Potato has (using APIs). Yelp + Foursquare would have been a formidable power play in the location space. Instead, Yelp’s check-in offering is still pretty weak, while Foursquare’s is still pretty small.

Scoble also mentions that it might be wise for Foursquare to buy another service to bolster its offering. That’s not a bad idea, especially when they close that round of funding they’re working on. Scoble specifically menions Foodspotting — a service I like a lot — and that makes a lot of sense. But it may be wiser to think beyond that (or buy Foodspotting and extend their services). Foursquare needs a way to upload pictures and make comments on check-ins (and pictures). Basically, they need to copy the functionality Gowalla has right now. There’s always a fine line between keeping a service simple and cluttering it up with feature creep, but Gowalla’s mixture of check-ins, comments, and pictures is pretty damn perfect in my view right now.

Another idea Scoble brings up is a “check-out.” I love this. He talks about it from customer loyalty perspective, which is a good point, but I think it goes beyond that. One problem I have with Foursquare is that it’s too often populated with inaccurate (old) information. That is, I may go somewhere check-in when I get there, but 30 minutes later I’m gone. Someone who shows up 15 minutes after that (after seeing my check-in on Foursquare) will have missed me. This happens quite a bit. Sadly, the only way to “check-out” of a venue is to check-in to another one. That’s no good.

The problem with a check-out is that it’s total feature-creep. And I would bet that only a small percentage of those that check-in would ever explicitly check-out too — it’s simply asking users to do too much. That leads me to my main point. I think we’re on the verge of location services getting even more interesting thanks largely to one thing: iOS 4.

Apple’s new mobile operating system (formerly known as iPhone OS 4), which is launching in about a week, brings with it the ability for third-party applications to run in the background for the first time. One of the allowed functions is background location. Here’s how I see this working with Foursquare: you go to a venue, you load up Foursquare and check-in. The app then stays open in the background for a set period of time, notes when your location changes, and checks you out of the venue when you move far enough away.

Obviously, this would auto check-out would need to be opt-in, but it seems like the perfect initial use of the new iOS with background location. The next step is the auto check-in — but that’s a bit more complicated, and I think users may not be ready for it yet. Still, it would be a cool option to have. The app could track you location in the background and if you stop at some place for long enough, it could ask you if you’d like to check-in there.

By now, you Android fanboys have probably already left several comments along the lines of ”but Android has been able to run location in the background for 2 years.” That’s true, but let’s be honest: it’s the iPhone that’s going to help this type of activity take off (just as it was the iPhone that helped background location take off in the first place). Foursquare, Gowalla, Loopt, etc still see the vast majority of their activity on the iPhone. Android may be able to extend upon these new location ideas, but it will be the iPhone that puts them in the mind of most consumers.

And this is just the most basic functionality made possible by the new iOS. I bet we see a new range of location service pop-up this year thanks to the background location-functionality. And I still bet that a lot of those companies get snatched up by the bigger players looking to compete. And the location turf wars will heat up even more.

Editor’s note: The following is a guest post written by Robert Scoble, who travels the world for Rackspace interviewing tech geeks for building43.com. He’s one of the most popular (stalked) users of location-based services and has 8,215 friends on Foursquare. Here he writes about what the location-based world could look like in 2012 and what might keep it from happening.

It’s January 2012 and you’ve just gotten your new Android 3.0-based phone. You’re going on a road trip so you start up the newly-released Foursquare. Gone are the checkins of 2010. Now you tell it where you’re going. This time we’re headed to Harrah’s at Stateline, Nevada. But this is no Foursquare you’ve ever seen before. They’ve finally integrated Waze, Tungle.me, and Yelp information into it. So, let’s discover more of what happens on our trip.

As we pull out of my driveway in Half Moon Bay we cross a geofence that sends alerts to the various systems that I’ve connected to Foursquare. Tungle.me knows I’m meeting Mike Arrington for dinner at Harrah’s. He gets an alert on his mobile phone that I’m on my way and Glympse sends him the ability to watch my progress so he’ll know if I’ll be on time. Plancast lets me know that four friends are attending the Black Eyed Peas concert at Harrah’s tonight. I see that Siri is offering to find me tickets, so I ask it to find me some tickets under $400 each.

Later in our drive, the kids are screaming. Hungry critters, they are. So, we pull out our cell phone and tell Siri: “we need fast food along the freeway.” Siri has already been tracking us as we drive along and it now contacts the APIs from Foursquare and Yelp and then compares both of their databases and quickly learns that we mostly check into McDonalds and In-N-Out. The system talks to us: “we found a McDonalds five miles ahead right off the freeway and there’s an In-N-Out eight miles ahead.” It continues: “If you want to try something else other than your two usual choices, or if you need a recommendation for the kids, let us know.”

McDonalds sounds fun, because Milan likes their Chicken McNuggets and also likes playing in their Playland play rooms. So, we ask Siri: “does that McDonalds have a Playland?” Siri runs off to McDonalds database of Playland locations and comes back with: “no, but we’ve found a location with a Playland 25 miles ahead of your location. Would you like to choose that one?”

After McDonalds we hit Sacramento and now Foursquare, which has joined with Israeli-company Waze, pops up with a new warning: “there’s an accident ahead and travelers in front of you are reporting delays of 15 minutes.” Up pops a photo of the wreck that an anonymous user has posted. Soon we find ourselves stuck in that traffic and so we start chatting with people also stuck in the traffic. “Hey, have you tried the Beatles station on Pandora?” someone asks. Damn, is that Steve Gillmor stuck along with us?

As we drive down the road we’re constantly checking into various things and places. We ask Siri about National Historical places along our route and it pulls up Wikipedia entries about what we’re passing onto our screens.

When we arrive at Harrah’s, we cross another geofence which lets Arrington know we’re here. It also checks us into Foursquare, and tells us: “there are 29 other people we know about, including three of your friends.” Then Siri (which received a message from our geofence) chimes in with: “are you still having dinner with Mike Arrington at 8 p.m. at Friday’s Station Steak & Seafood Grill?” I answer: “yes.” That goes away, but on screen is a Yelp review about that restaurant and I
realize that the attire is dressy and I only have jeans and t-shirts. So, I ask Siri: “are there any other four-star restaurants like Friday’s Station nearby?” It answers with a list from Yelp and then it starts showing places that still have spots left for us this evening by querying OpenTable’s APIs. Siri then tells me it has found two seats for tonight’s show at Harrah’s outdoor arena, and asks if it should buy them from Stubhub?

Since there’s a couple of hours before dinner, I figure I’d find a cigar shop since I have a feeling Arrington might like a good cigar since the 12th Techcrunch Disrupt conference was a huge success. Siri again finds me a place named “Puffin,” which is a short walk away from the hotel.

While at dinner, Arrington says he’d love to take the Heavenly Valley Gondola up to see the view. We make arrangements to meet the next morning to do just that and off I go with Maryam to see the concert. Oh, and Siri automatically checked us into the Pepsi Loot app, because we were in one of the official restaurants that uses Pepsi and that gives us free stuff for checking in at Pepsi-serving locations.

The next morning, when I walk out the hotel to meet Arrington at the Gondola ride I walk through another geofence that Tungle.me has setup around my hotel (it manages my schedule and knows where I am) and it sends an alert to Siri saying: “I see you’ve left the Harrah’s hotel, can you let me know where you are going?” I say into my phone: “I’m going to meet Mike Arrington at the Heavenly Valley Gondola.” It quickly brings back a link for the Gondola ride and asks: “is this where you are headed?” I say: “yes.” It says: “if you buy your ticket at your hotel you’ll save $6 per ticket; see the concierge.”

After I get home, Siri talks to yet more webservices: Blippy, to get my credit card statements, and Expensify, for expense reports. Siri fills out my expense report with details gained from me along the way. It knows which dinners were business ones, and which ones were personal based on things I’ve set along the way (in Google Calendar, for instance, I mark my personal meetings with a tag).

I can hear you saying “Scoble, what are you smoking?”

Seriously, you can do a whole lot of what I’m talking about (including saving the $6 on the gondola ride) today BUT there is something wrong: these services are all information silos that aren’t aware of each other.

I tried to do most of this scenario this weekend. What happened?

• I found out about the concert at Harrah’s too late to buy tickets.
• I found out about the $6 discount on the Heavenly Gondola after I had gotten to the top.
• I found out about the traffic jams after I had already gotten caught in them and didn’t know much about what caused them. And the system couldn’t tell us the best spot to have dinner based on traffic conditions (maybe if we had waited an hour and a half we would have spent less time in traffic).
• I almost got a ticket because I didn’t know about a speed trap up ahead of us. If more people used Waze or Trapster that wouldn’t be a problem, but Waze doesn’t know about Trapster’s users and Trapster doesn’t know about Waze’s users.
• We ate at a McDonalds that didn’t have a Playland. Siri doesn’t know about Playland, or that McDonalds has a page where you can look for locations that have Playlands. Our dinner date didn’t know we were running late because of the traffic jam (yeah, we called, but in the future they’ll just know exactly where we are and how long they should expect to wait for us).
• Siri, when it worked, didn’t bring us anything serendipitous because it didn’t know what people on Google Buzz were talking about. It didn’t know anything about how many friends were checked in at the hotel, or at places near us. It didn’t know that a popular concert would start in a few hours and that it might have been able to get us seats.
• As we drove along using Waze it didn’t tell me about historical landmarks. It didn’t show me where the In-N-Outs were. And when we wanted some coffee we had to switch to Google Maps to find Starbucks.
• When in Google Maps I turned on the Google Buzz layer and it showed me lots of Buzzes from people but it didn’t try to point out important ones that might impact my experience. It forced me to click on dozens of Buzz items on a map in an attempt to find anything useful. Ever pick up rocks in a stream wondering what you will find underneath? That’s sort of like Buzz’s experience.
• When I checkin with the new Pepsi Loot, it doesn’t check me into Foursquare, Loopt, or any of the other loyalty services that are coming out over the next few months.
• If we flew into Reno instead of driven, TripIt wouldn’t know anything about my Google Calendar and couldn’t warn people on my calendar if our flight was late. And TripIt isn’t able to check us into the airport even though it knows our plane landed.
• Yahoo news didn’t know that we left Half Moon Bay, so didn’t know that it should bring us news about Stateline, Nevada.
• Gilt didn’t warn my wife when we passed by the outlet stores in Vacaville that there were some great deals on purses she was considering.
• Paypal or Square weren’t able to be used for anything on our trip.

So, who are the winners and losers here?

Overall, the losers, so far, are us. In 2010 we’re seeing more and more location data silos being produced. The most recent ones are Loopt Star and PepsiLoot. These new services add more of a “tax” and don’t really combine in ways to make our lives interesting. That can’t continue if companies actually want us to use location-based services.

The losers, also, are the whole industry. Everyone will see slower adoption of all location-based services because of their limited utility if this doesn’t change.

But more specifically, the winners and losers:

Winners?

• Apple, because it already owns Siri, which is the best UI for smartphones for interacting with the world around you. And hooking up all these different services will be pretty easy for them to do over the next 18 months.
• Google, because it already has so much location and scheduling data and is gathering more every day.
• Facebook, because it already has so much data about people that it can use to present location information to us and can sell access to that data to others, like Apple, who will use it to augment their experiences.
• SimpleGeo, because they are becoming an arbitrage system for moving data in real time between all of these players. That should be monetizable in the way that Twitter is selling data streams to Google and Microsoft.

Losers?

• Yahoo, because they haven’t yet figured out how to get us to share much location data with it.
• Microsoft, because it is locked out of most of this new world too.
• Gowalla, Brightkite, Whrrl, because they haven’t made any moves yet to present malleable social graphs in the way that Foursquare has.
• Individual loyalty programs. The first ones, like Pepsi Loot, will probably be popular because they are first but others will find tired and unengaged consumers and will need to join up with bigger players to get traction.

Along for the ride?

• Plancast, TripIt, Blippy, Tungle.me, Expensify, are all along for the ride. They provide unique data that the others don’t and unless someone else comes along that provides that data in a better way than these folks do, I think they are safe for the moment.

Disrupted?

• Yelp and other restaurant listings could be disrupted in this new world where you’ll choose your restaurants based on where you actually are, what friends you’ve added to systems like Facebook, and tips from your friends (which are quite different from the crowd reviews at Yelp).
• Yahoo News could be dramatically disrupted. Today, I met with the Yahoo news team and talked about needing different news based on where I was (I found out about riots in Guangzhou, China, after we arrived there and Twitter friends asked us if we were caught in the riots?)

Commerce winners?

• Gilt, Foursquare, and Loopt seem to be aimed in the right direction by bringing users goodies for using these services. But it’s too early to say that one of these will be a clear winner in bringing promotions and offers to us. Bigger companies, like Google, with its huge sales teams, or, better yet, eBay, which has relationships with lots of small-town retailers, could totally change the game here.

So what could keep the world I laid out here from happening?

I’ve already caught wind of plans that Apple has to build Siri into a much more complete offering. You’ll be able to talk to your iPhone that will come out next year (Siri is owned by Apple but won’t be built into iPhones in a serious way until 2011) and you’ll be able to do a variety of tasks from ordering a pizza, finding a taxi or a movie time, to recommending a restaurant to take your date to. But what happens if Apple ends up building its own maps, its own location checkin service, it’s own advertising system for bringing promotions and offers to you, its own payment system, and its own travel apps? Well, then, this system would happen for Apple customers but that would weaken the ability for other companies to compete. And that would force Google’s hand into competing, or buying, these companies up, which would keep Apple from having access to some of these companies’ APIs.

But Google buying these companies and integrating them together with its voice recognition systems is probably the best possible scenario. Facebook isn’t a mature enough company yet to properly integrate all of these into some sort of new business graph and make that all usable by 2012.

Some companies are trying to integrate these services, or provide infrastructure that makes integration possible as well.

CloudMade is using the OpenStreetMap to hook these services together on a common map. And the IETF is working on a variety of standards to make it easier for companies to interoperate with their location. If they can succeed, the vision I laid out of 2012 should be a reality.

[photo: flickr/pinto 2003]

Over the past several months I’ve moderated or been on a number of panels with many of the top players in the location space. A common theme keeps recurring. When someone brings up rivalries between any of the companies, it is always downplayed in favor of an “everyone wins” message. I’ve been skeptical of that since day one, but as the space has exploded, there have been signs that a lot of companies are winning (as evidenced by both usage and fundraising). But now, as the space matures and larger rivals enter, things are starting to get more testy.

The most obvious rivalry is between Foursquare and Gowalla. Even as the two battled for supremacy at the SXSW conference this year, both sides downplayed the rivalry. But the fact is, there is a rivalry (and they even play it up for next month’s UK edition of Wired magazine — see: pic above). Foursquare and Gowalla don’t talk to one another — in fact, their two leaders, Dennis Crowley and Josh Williams, had never met until a panel I moderated at Where 2.0 after SXSW this year. That’s not to say they hate one another, but they’re also not out there holding location potlucks to discuss how they can work together for the betterment of everyone.

On Monday, another competitor in the space, Loopt, released its latest location app, Loopt Star, which asks users to check-in places to engage with brands. Crowley wasn’t a big fan of this (to say the least), and let it be known on his blog. “Check out Loopt’s foursquare knock-off. Points for checkins and “boss” instead of “mayor,”” he wrote. He continued:

Not to be a hater, but if I was going to create a foursquare knockoff, I’d use game mechanics and create something *totally different* (e.g. the “Points 2.0” stuff we’re cooking up now @ foursquare HQ).

Why would you ever just clone someone else’s work? Learn from it and innovate on top! That’s how we all push this space forward!

Earlier today, Loopt CEO Sam Altman tweeted out that he thought Foursquare was blocking the IP address of his office. Crowley responded on Twitter that it wasn’t intentional as far as he knew. But the block is still in place.

Crowley’s criticism of Loopt Star is very similar to a post he did back in January in response to Yelp entering the check-in space. At the time, Crowley wrote:

Shameless. At least innovate on top of it!:

Most any foursquare user will tell you our leaderboard is flawed. It tracks the wrong metrics; it encourages fake checks & cheating; etc. We’ve been hustling these past few months to build the infrastruture that allow us to tweak the game mechanics on our end (think: Leaderboard 2.0)

Poor guys, you copied the wrong stuff!

Of course, nearly 6 months later, we have yet to see this Leaderboard 2.0 stuff that he keeps referring to (Foursquare has undoubtedly been distracted by scaling issues and Yahoo acquisition offers).

As the company generally seen as the frontrunner in this space right now, of course Foursquare is going to have others gunning for it. But they’re hardly the only ones getting testy with rivals. Behind the scenes, a number of these companies seem to have a growing dislike (or at least, distrust) for one another. They may say the right things when they’re on stage or on panels, but it’s a different story when the spotlight is off.

All of this is to be expected. As the location space continues to be validated, each company is out to prove that it’s the one that will be the next big thing — the one people will remember. And as more people are beginning to understand that they can’t use all of these services all the time, some are going to be forced out.

And there’s a larger concern for many of these companies: it’s still far from proven that each can survive as their own businesses. Some are starting to make revenues, but those can quickly dry up if larger networks like Facebook or Google start to copy features and entice brands to sign up with them instead. And plenty of the larger companies out there still view the location startups as features rather than stand-alone products. If that thought starts panning out, many of these locations startups will be fighting to position themselves for quick exits.

Indications right now are that Facebook won’t enter the space in a major way (but will have simple check-ins), and instead will federate other location services’ data. But that will cause tensions too as each location service tries to become the preferred method that Facebook’s nearly 500 million users choose.

The next time you’re at an event and you hear one of these guys say that in the location space “everybody wins,” don’t believe them, because they don’t believe it either. That may have been the case in the early days, but we’re beyond that now. And all of these companies know it and are starting to act like it.

[photo: flickr/dpstyles]

Back in March, I wrote about the problem of check-in fatigue. That is, with so many location-based check-in services now out there, it’s exhausting to open each one every time to check-in to the same place across multiple networks. The solution, for now at least, is Check.in. And it’s ready to open to everyone tonight.

Check.in is an HTML5 web app made by Brightkite that allows you to check-in to a venue on multiple location-based services. Those services including Foursquare, Gowalla, and of course, Brightkite. This works by taking advantage of those services’ APIs alongside some backend place matching that Brightkite does on its end. The result is being able to check-in across multiple services in a few seconds rather than taking a few minutes to load up the various apps and hit the required buttons on each to check-in.

Since Check.in went live in closed beta in March, over 6,000 users have tried it out, generating some 135,000 check-ins, I’m told. The average user checked-in 20 times, and there were over 2 million place queries in the beta period.

That last statistic speaks to why we need some sort of unified Places database (this app just does place matching, not unification). Brightkite had indicated they’d be willing to do something like that, but the problem is the other companies who are all saying the right things now — but may not be so quick to hand over their databases with the places they’ve collected. It’s also an extremely hard problem to solve since not all the data is perfectly aligned (misspellings, slightly off GPS, etc).

The point is, even if everyone seems to say they want it, it’s not happening anytime soon. And so we have Check.in.

Since the closed beta began, Brightkite has also added two new services to the check-in roster: Whrrl and TriOut. Each of these is still experimental alongside Gowalla, which is currently on Check.in thanks to an API work-around (Gowalla has a read-only API at the moment).

Some other data that Brightkite saw during the beta trial was that people check-in most often on Friday, and least often on Sunday. And most users opt to use two of the check-in services, followed by those who choose to use three. Four and five were much less popular (though Whrrl and TriOut weren’t available the entire time), and one was somewhat popular — though I’m not sure what the point of using check.in is if you’re only going to use it with one service.

Since it’s HTML5, Check.in will work with iPhones, Android phones, and yes, the iPad. Just point your web browser here to find it.

In terms of design, Gowalla has always had a leg up on rival Foursquare. (Seeing as much of the Gowalla’s team background is design, that’s hardly surprising.) Today, the service has unveiled yet another overhaul of their website design. And along with it, they’ve brought in a new business opportunity.

First, the site itself looks great. While Gowalla rolled out a revamp just prior to SXSW in March that looked pretty good, this new one is better. The reason is that it greatly simplifies things down to the core of the service. That is, the check-ins. For a long time, Gowalla was focusing on items you were carrying, and special pins and stamps. Now the focus is solely on your stream of check-in activity (on your profile page) and the stream of your friends’ check-ins (on the main page).

Items are still there on your profile page, but they’re buried all the way at the bottom of the right side column. Pins, meanwhile, are only found in a link below your name next to stamps. It’s smart of Gowalla to move this stuff to the side so new users can figure out what to do right away (check-in). The new design also highlights pictures you’ve taken (both in your stream and prominantly on the right side), as well as comments. These are key because they’re two features that Foursquare doesn’t offer.

From a business perspective, the much bigger deal about this redesign is that is also allows brands to more closely weave themselves into the fun. Gowalla is launching a new branded Trips feature that allows brands to offer their own content and advice on the service based around places. The two launch partners for this are National Geographic and The Washington Post.

National Geographic is working with Gowalla to offer walking tours in 15 cities around the U.S., Canada and Europe. A new feature called Spot Descriptions allows them (or any user) to highlight why they’ve added a particular place to a trip.

The Washington Post, meanwhile, is offering Trips based on their “Going Out Guides” to help visitors get around Washington D.C. The newspaper’s writers put these together.

These branded Trips are a good idea, and slightly more engaging than what brands are offering on Foursquare through their Tips area. It’s good to see Trips branching beyond being the best way to organize a pub crawl.

It was only a matter of time. Since last summer, we’ve been tracking the progress of SCVNGR, a location-based gaming platform that allows users to build engaging, real-world scavenger hunts that use their mobile devices to both receive clues and solve riddles. Until now the service has primarily catered to museums, universities, and businesses, who use it for things like tours, orientations, and team-building exercises (they’re up to over 600 paying customers). Now SCVNGR, which recently raised $4 million from Google Ventures,  is getting a bit more ambitious: it’s looking to turn the world into one big scavenger hunt, and it’s going to be taking on the likes of Foursquare and Gowalla in the process.

To mark the launch of this new consumer-facing side of SCVNGR, the startup has launched new applications for iPhone and Android (you can grab the iPhone app here, and a QR code for the Android app is here) (it’s US-only for now). If you’ve used Foursquare or Gowalla before, the applications should look pretty familiar at first — you can ‘check-in’ to any of the 20 million venues in the SCVNGR database and see what your friends are up to. But there’s a key difference: SCVNGR revolves around interactive ‘challenges’, which users are prompted to complete when they visit a venue. These can range from simple things, like the act of checking-in at a venue or taking a goofy photo with a store mannequin, to much richer experiences, depending on how creative the business gets.

SCVNGR CEO Seth Priebatsch acknowledges that this is already a crowded space with some very well-funded competitors, but he believes that this ‘challenge’ angle will be enough to differentiate SCVNGR from the rest of the pack. He explains that the value of a check-in on a service like Foursquare tends to be very transient in nature — if you see that check-in an hour or two after it was created, there’s a good chance it is no longer relevant, as the user may well have moved on to their next destination. Challenges, Priebatsch believes, have a much longer shelf life.

As an example, Priebatsch described what might happen if you walked into a local burrito shop that had set up a few challenges on SCVNGR. After pulling out your phone and checking in, the app could prompt you to build an origami figure out of the tin foil your burrito came in, and to upload a picture of your creation to the service.  Doing so would reward you with some SCVNGR points (which are currently valueless but will likely be part of a reward system in the future). So while your friends may not see your check-in by hours or days, they would probably still enjoy the photo of your burrito’s tin foil swan. Another challenge could charge users with using clues scattered around a store to solve a riddle, for example.

Challenges can be created by anyone, including both business owners and their customers (you could also create challenges at a non-business venue like a park if you wanted to). Screening and flagging systems are in place to ensure that there aren’t any inappropriate challenges. And while most challenges will be created from phones, businesses that want to create challenges at multiple locations at once (like a restaurant chain), will be able to do so using SCVNGR’s enterprise tools.

In some ways SCVNGR is late to the game — aside from Foursquare, there are plenty of other competitors, including Loopt, Gowalla, Brightkite, and probably Facebook in the near future, and all of them are going to be vying for attention from local businesses. Every venue in SCVNGR’s database will come with three basic challenges (one of which is a basic check-in), but it will only be fun if users and businesses start putting the time in to make engaging, creative challenges. In this sense, there’s a bit of a chicken-and-egg problem.

All of that said, I like that SCVNGR is setting out to offer a more engaging experience than Foursquare and Gowalla, which I got bored of pretty quickly (yes, I know plenty of people are totally addicted to them — I just find the gaming elements of these services to be superficial). I suspect the popularity of SCVNGR will be tied to how widespread challenges are, and, more important, how fun they are. Likewise, SCVNGR is going to have to incent users to play the game by getting businesses to offer rewards and coupons for completing their challenges (show them the money). Some gamers will keep jumping on to SCVNGR because it’s fun, but the service needs a carrot to dangle in front of users to get them hooked.

Like Twitter before it, and Facebook before that, Foursquare is gaining some momentum as a platform. There are now some 500 apps out there, co-founder Dennis Crowley tells us. Or at least, he thinks there are that many based on the number of registered tokens out there. Truth be told, even Foursquare only knows of about 100 or so of them first-hand. And that’s why they’re launching a new App Gallery today to help surface all of them.

The new gallery, found here, is a bit sparse at the moment. Foursquare is only highlight 10 apps to show a proof of concept for how the gallery will work. They’re asking all developers to submit their app through this page (or use this link) so they can showcase all the various apps built on top of Foursquare.

Along the top of this page, Foursquare will feature four apps in a nice, auto-rotating big box. Below that, they’ll have a box showing sets of six apps that you can page through. Or you can select different app categories such as “Mobile,” “Websites,” “Games,” and others. Along the right-hand side there is also a list of the most recently added apps. Users of Apple’s App Store will find the layout fairly familiar.

Apps themselves also have their own pages in the App Gallery. For example, here’s the page for Mob Zombies, an iPhone games that is built on top of Foursquare. Apps get descriptions and screenshots. The pagers also feature Facebook’s new Like button to easily share. And, of course, there’s a big button to “Try this application.”

Foursquare has some good timing. Their app gallery launches just as some developers are starting to get annoyed with rival Gowalla’s limited API. As for Foursquare’s API, the work continues. “We’re actively working with developers to define v2 of our API,” Crowley tells us.

Naturally, I also asked Crowley about the acquisition rumors. He notes that just in time for TechCrunch Disrupt (where he’ll be speaking), they’ll be “ready to annouce that we got acquired… by Nabisco!,” Crowley jokes. “We’re rebranding as TriscuitSquare. It’s gonna be SICK.”

Funny guy.

History (read: Twitter) has taught us that combining a great service with a stable, open API usually makes for a healthy ecosystem that has the ability to improve said service, both for its users and the company powering it.

New features and functionalities that are left out of the provider’s roadmap – for whatever reason – get implemented by creative third-party developers, leaving end users with more choice and experiences catered to their needs.

In the case of Gowalla, the location-based social network that rivals companies like Foursquare, Rummble, Where and plenty of others for world domination in the geolocation space, the foundations of that ecosystem appear to be shaky at best. The situation has gotten to a point where even the startup’s most rabid fans are freezing third-party development projects and call for the company to get its act together urgently – to become more like Foursquare, in many ways.

Leading the movement is London-based developer Ben Dodson, who has dedicated a lot of his time and resources on Gowalla Tools, a set of utilities for avid users (including an iPhone, Web, Twitter and desktop app). The man has penned an extensive, solid open letter directed at Gowalla management, in which he calls for the company to change its ways.

He’s not alone in his quest; several third-party developers have co-signed the letter, which is mostly a request for Gowalla to be more upfront about the changes it makes to the public API it debuted back in February, and to be more communicative in general.

I’ll let you read the whole thing (and quietly get a vicious headache from all the colors on that page) but here’s the vital part:

The major problem with the API is its fluid and changeable nature. Whilst we accept that any application will inevitably have bug fixes and changes, an API is supposed to provide a stable endpoint on which third party services can rely on.

This is not the case with the Gowalla API which seems to change on a whim fairly frequently. Worse than a changing API, the developers of any applications relying on the API are rarely informed of changes (and when they are, they usually appear a day or so after the event has happened and the community have worked out fixes for themselves).

Dodson, for one, is putting Gowalla Tools on hiatus until the startup fixes some of the problems he mentions in the letter, which goes into detail about the issues at hand and also proactively suggests a number of solutions (which, again, is basically to be more like Foursquare in the way that the Gowalla competitor reaches out to third-party developers and manages its API).

I contacted Gowalla CEO and co-founder Josh Williams about the whole ordeal, but as he was currently in the middle of a long meeting he’ll only be able to formulate a proper response later today. We’ll update this post when we learn more about how Gowalla views things.

Update: Williams responds in corporate speak:

As a small team we have been diligently focused on improving performance and positioning Gowalla for the future. We recognize this may have affected some of our developers over the past few weeks and we are actively working to strengthen communication and create an even more robust experience for our entire community.

Last month, Erick wrote a post calling for the creation of an open database of places. As location-based services continue to gain popularity, each of them is building up these massive databases of places themselves, and this is going to become an issue as services like Twitter and potentially Facebook attempt to federate all this data. And Erick is hardly alone in thinking about this — nearly all the companies involved in the space talk about such an idea enthusiastically, and regularly. Yet no one seems to be doing much about it just yet.

Back in March, I moderated a panel featuring key members of Foursquare, Gowalla, Loopt, Twitter, and Plancast. When I raised the idea of a unified place database, all seemed to be in agreement that it would be a good thing. Even when I brought up that their own place databases were a way to keep their users around, everyone seemed to think there were better ways to do that, and that the benefits of a unified place database would outweigh any costs. Foursquare co-founder Dennis Crowley reiterated that to Erick last month, saying that a “‘Facebook Connect of places’ would be amazing.“

This past week, at Web 2.0 Expo, the discussion started up once again, with a different group of people in the space. This time, key members of Twitter, Google, and Brightkite talked about the idea. Of those, Martin May of Brightkite seemed to be the most adamant about it. When moderator Brady Forrest asked if Brightkite could build such a database, May responded with, “We could.” He went on to say that they’ve spoken with several other companies about such an open place project.

May also hinted that Brightkite may open up the data they’ve gotten from Check.in, their service that allows you to check-in to Foursquare, Gowalla, and Brightkite via one application. Because that app has to search each of those services’ databases to find the correct place to check-in at across all three, Brightkite likely has some interesting data tying at least some of these places on the different databases together.

Steve Lee of Google (working on Latitude) jumped in to say that he likes what Brightkite is doing with Check.in, but thinks that it’s still too cumbersome. “There should be a standard, but it’s not without complications,” Lee said. These include technical challenges and licensing issues, Lee noted, saying that it would be difficult for Google to do this because so much of their [place] data is licensed from third parties.

“Google is interested in solving the problem, but it’s not easy,” Lee concluded with.

Twitter’s Elad Gil (who came over when Twitter bought GeoAPI) was more much more optimistic about a solution. In fact, he’s positive it will come, and thinks that all of the various location applications need to be prepared when it does with ways to truly differentiate themselves. “All these applications have ot think about how to differentiate. It’s hard to build out the database of locations, but fundamentally the technical problems will go away,” Gil said.

That rings true. But the question remains: who will build it? Twitter seems to be passing the buck to Google, who seems to be passing it right back to Twitter. Brightkite clearly wants to, but will any of the other players really trust a rival with their data? If not, will they start to restrict their APIs to make it harder to access the place information in bulk?

The obvious solution is to have a completely open database, as Erick laid out. But again, that is easier said than done. We’ve seen that time and time again with a number of different initiatives. “Open” sounds great until someone has to actually do it, be in charge of it, and get users to use it.

That leaves the 800-pound gorilla: Facebook.

As they get ready to unleash their location-based component, one that will supposedly integrate with venues, I wouldn’t doubt that they’ll be not-so-slowly gathering up and organizing a massive database of places. They’ll open this up, via the Open Graph API, but everyone will complain that it’s not really open. Then Twitter will step up with their solution (they’ve been accumulating the necessary data for some time now). Then Google will too. It’s amazing what a little competition can do.

Of course, if that happens, we’ll be left with the same problem, just at a higher level. And the dance will continue.

[photo: flickr/pedrosimones7]