Andrew is Committing Location Based Service Suicide and truthfully, I may join him. I love these apps. My favorite right now is Gowalla, but Foursquare is extremely good, and other apps like BrightKite, Yelp and many more are joining the fray. People will flock to the one where their friends are, so the app doesn’t really matter that much, but I do think we’ll be seeing them fight for market share for some time to come. Reports are even in that Twitter’s growth has slowed and some reports even that it’s declined some.

Most of these location based apps focus on checking in and they have created a meta game around the concept of checking in, like earning points, badges or becoming a mayor. Meta gaming has it’s own problems, but the Andrew’s issue seems to be with the broadcasting of his checking in. Most apps let you decide to broadcast that or not, and with these apps using meta gaming to encourage people to check in they gather data. People have to add locations and enter details and when they do, they earn points. Something people love to do. So the meta gaming aspect is good, for now.

Where these location based apps are failing at the moment is truly using the GPS/Location to create more interesting experiences in the real world. I’d like to walk into a place I’ve never been and find virtual notes left for me by previous patrons. Maybe someone knows the best food at a local dive or a particular waitress I should avoid at all costs. Or maybe I’m downtown and walk past a building and a “note” pops up telling me there’s a cool little bar down the side alley that most people don’t know about. People could leave pictures, notes and even video/voice just floating int the ether for others to find. The trick is, these apps need to do this triggering automatically. When I walk in, my phone needs to tell me there’s more to explore about this area based on previous patrons.

The problem is right now everything is based on us, the users both entering data and looking for these notes and other info that people leave virtually in these spots. But this is only the beginning of the location based trend and I think were going to see some cool stuff in the next several months. I don’t think I’m quite ready to opt out of “checking in”, but I may not be broadcasting it when I do.