“Location is the next big thing” hoert man immer wieder sagen.

Temporaerer Fixpunkt des Interesses in der Schublade Location based mobile applications sind derzeit wohl Foursquare oder Gowalla. Selbige auch von Herrn Martin Weigert in seinem Beitrag : “Wann macht Facebook endlich ernst ?” erwaehnt. Wobei ich immer wieder BrightKite bevorzuge. Weshalb ?

Foursquare traegt an sich alle Kernfunktion in sich, welche man von Plazes kennen mag: Ich zeige via GPS meinen derzeitigen Aufenthaltsort und sehe sogleich, so sie den ihrigen ebenfalls permanent abgleichen, wo meine Freunde sind.

Auf Foursquare kommt eine interessante Option hinzu, man kann sich als “Experte” fuer einen Ort qualifizieren. Fuer jeden Besuch einer bestimmten Location erhaelt man Punkte. Die jenige, Nase die fuer diesen Ort die meisten Punkte hat, wird zum Mayor gekuert.

One popular element of Foursquare is a competition to become "mayor" of different places. If you check in more than anyone else, you claim rights as "the mayor" source

Was den spielerischen Gebrauch dieser Applikation, wie J. Kleske im pl0gcast #15 es nannte, unterstreicht. Derzeit aber (noch) nicht wirklich in Deutschland nutzbar.

Anders hingegen Gowalla. Eine sehr interessante wie aufschlussreiche Erlaeuterung findet man im Beitrag “Gowalla CEO Josh Williams on game mechanics, user experience, and competition”

[..] When did Gowalla launch, and how has it grown? Can you give numbers?

Williams: We launched a very raw “seed” version of Gowalla at SXSW in March. It had some GPS-related problems and didn’t play well with Facebook, but it did allow us to work out the kinks with a small group of users. About 4 weeks ago we released Gowalla 1.2 to the app store. Since then we’ve seen our user base multiply times over.

Nearly 50,000 points of interest have been added to Gowalla in thousands of cities around the world. We’ll announce some other numbers in the weeks to come. We feel blessed to already a very strong user community forming around Gowalla. This is going to lead our charge as we grow.

Location is the next big thing. How will Gowalla stand out among other services to be the best?

Williams: We’re focused on building a really high-quality user experience. Our team has a strong design background, and we hope this shows throughout our products on the web and mobile devices. If we play to our strengths, take care of our customers, keep our service reliable, and continue to innovate, our future will be bright.

As an aside, we’re very keen on exploration as well. I don’t just want you to share your location with your friends. I want you to go some place special or remarkable because you want to tell the world about it.

Speaking of competition, who else is in your space? Have you learned anything from other startups pursuing the same objectives?

Williams: We really didn’t jump into the location space to go toe-to-toe with anyone. We just saw an opportunity to do something WAAAY out there. Prior to creating Gowalla, none of us had regularly used the more established location-based services because we felt like there was little incentive to do so. We believed adding incentives (the pretty icons) would make sharing your location seem more real and fun, much like adding stickers to a suitcase or the back of your MacBook.

During this same time Foursquare has also come on the scene trying to solve a similar problem (incentives) in a bit of a different—yet still compelling—manner. [..]

Grandiose Idee, doch haengenden Hauptes haelt sich meine effective Nutzung dieser APP spaerlichst in Grenzen,

da ich aus mir unerklaerlichen Gruenden keine “eigenen Spots”, sondern derzeit ausschliesslich andere schon “eingetragene” Orte benennen kann …

Auch ist, was fuer mich den Nutzwert einer recommendation APP enorm erhoeht, keine Photo upload option gegeben. Somit ist und bleibt BrightKite meine Rosine der Location based mobile applications .