23 Mar 2010, Posted by Ross Floate in Thoughts, 0 Comments

Location is where it’s at.

By now you’ve probably heard that the next big thing in social media is location. Certainly if my trip to South by Southwest Interactive is anything to go by, location is all anyone is really talking about. SimpleGeo, FourSquare, Gowalla and to a lesser extent Loopt were highly visible. In a small city with over 10,000 geeks attending the festival location services make a lot of sense. If you want to be at the same panels, parties or bars as your friends, it’s a hell of a lot easier to check an app than to text everyone.

But that’s a pretty extreme use case. When else are you going to use it? Well Gowalla and FourSquare are hoping that the answer to that will be ‘all the time’. Each of these apps incorporates gameplay elements to their services to encourage ongoing use. FourSquare, as you probably already know, rewards users by anointing them ‘mayors’ of certain locations. Gowalla gives ‘pins’ and ‘badges’.

What seemed to elevate Gowalla above FourSquare at SXSWi was their addition of real-world rewards. Checking at at certain locations during the convention rewarded users with in-app ‘items’ that could be exchanged for real-world equivalents.

If Gowalla extends this voucher system and make it possible for businesses all over the world to offer discounts and rewards to people who ‘check-in’ at their locations, then that’s a very compelling feature. Users will be rewarded for playing (which will drive adoption), and businesses will see new customers walking through the door and be able to structure cost-effective campaigns.

Trying to pick which check-in service is going to ‘win’ at the moment is hard (remember Friendster, Bebo and Hi5?), but the sheer sums of money being spent on location-based social media is enough to convince most pundits that location is here to stay.

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