Location-based apps: Flook, Gowalla, Foursquare - a review

Gowalla hasn't given me enough of a reason to keep coming back other than to tell my friends where I am. And I'm not convinced thats valuable until all my friends are on it, to which we'll require a Loopt infrastructure + Facebook user dealio.

Foursquare currently only works in specific cities, but I think its shallow in terms of why I'd keep coming back aside for the very shallow game of it. Is there value here? In the future if I get rewarded for being a mayor, and services get rewarded for active users visiting (eg: coupons) maybe.

I think in the short time Gowalla and Foursquare will duke it out, I'm skeptical that they'll get enough users without teaming up with a big player. Facebook has 300M web users. Loopt has 3M mobile users. Gowalla has 50k?

The other problem with these applications is the lack of background apps. Why do I have to manually check in to every place I go, why can't it work like Google Lattitude on my Blackberry: it just runs and does everything for me.

A Last.FM scrobbler for location, please. (Fire-eagle?)

Flook is interesting, but entirely disconnected from Gowalla and Foursquare. A better comparison for Flook is MobileSafari, or TwitPic, or Flickr. Flook is about content thats around me thats cool - who created it comes second to this. I guess there is also the element of where are my friends going that is interesting, but I believe that is secondary to the value of being somewhere and having interesting local hidden gems. And we all know the challenges with this kind of "information overload vs filter failure" plays, the devil is in the details.

I've been using Gowalla for about a week now and it's a neat little diversion when you're out on the town. I like that it works in my city which is relatively large, but not large enough to be recognized by Foursquare yet.

The downside to Gowalla is that there is a lot of cruft since anyone can basically add a location. For example, in my neighborhood, amidst the restaurants and stores is a location called "My Sister's" which I'm pretty sure isn't the name of the newest diner in town...

First time I've heard of Flook. Very, very interesting, but agreed that it's a disconnect from Foursquare, Gowalla, and Brightkite.

Good points on the user base, too. According to Compete data for November, Facebook is pulling in south of 130M unique visitors/month, and Twitter is pulling in around 22M. By comparison, Foursquare is pulling around 368K, Brightkite is around 228K, and Gowalla nearing 80K. Amazing what downtime in an airport can get you ;)

There seems to be some evidence that users are willing to share their location with micro-conversations (the reason Mashable called Foursquare the Twitter of 2010), but unlike Twitter, none of these guys have really robust APIs built out. Hell, Gowalla still doesn't have one, and Foursquare only let's you grab at per-user data, not per-location (beyond 3h).

I'm anxiously watching to see which network grabs the most users, and have my fingers crossed that the winner will have a way for the ecosystem around it to develop. Maybe it will be Twitter w/ Geo, but does that assume users will change their behavior and start using Twitter more while mobile? (see: Twitter usage over weekends. Most of the usage is us bored at work)

I would have liked to have seen Brightkite included in the review, as well.

Gowalla has raised $8.4M and has around 50K users as of December 2009.

Foursquare has raised $1.35M and has around 150K users as of December 2009.

Loopt has raised $13.3M and has around 2M users.