Since Twitter hit it big on Oprah about this time last year, everyone’s been wondering, “What’s the next big thing.” The technology that has been emerging as the next big thing appears to be location based social networking tools. Over the last year, services like Gowalla, Whrrl, and Foursquare have been catching on with the techset and are starting to reach the mainstream. It has forced other services like Yelp to incorporate location based checkins to their services.
Just in time for SXSW, one of the players in this area – Brightkite – is planning to launch a universal check-in feature to their service – tieing into the APIs of these other services. Essentially, this would allow users to check in via Brightkite and it would automatically update their location on Foursquare and others (although Gowalla’s API is currently read-only).
It will be interesting to watch the location based social networking services battle at SXSW this year. Me, I’ll keep updating the services I have on my phone – Yelp, Gowalla, and Foursquare (just removed Whrrl) – while I’m there.
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Hey—I just loaded up the new iphone version of Foursquare and Plancast. Foursquare scored some big news with a connection with Starbucks to leverage checkins as part of testing new ways to expand their customer rewards program.