Twiststl

Have you ever heard of Gowalla or Foursquare?  In case you didn't know, they're location based networking tools enjoying a great deal of attention at the moment. It seems that everyone and their grandmother is jumping on the bandwagon of geo-location and the notion of "checking in." But as Yan David-Ehrlich points out in his article, we really need to decide what we want to accomplish with social media.

 According to Ehrlich, social networking's real goal is to get users to create, share, and communicate, and while adding location can help facilitate this, it shouldn't be the end goal.  Location-based social networks need to look at what motivates users to share and design apps to help them do just that.  One thing he recommends is that checking in should be viewed as an accessory instead of building services directly around it - checking in should be more of a location enhancing feature, not the main feature.  Furthermore, he reminds marketers that the application should provide real world value.  Whether it's a picture of yourself on the Great Wall of China or scoring a new perfume at the beauty counter, there should be a reason that you're geo-tagging yourself.  Give users a "why" to check themselves in. Understand why a user pulls their phone out of their pocket in the beginning. Finally, he pushes for making checking in compelling to people.  If people have no real reason to do it, it will eventually lose its appeal and become a chore.  Some developers are attempting to stay relevant designing app stores and developig services to entice brands to join forces with them, but maybe they need to rethink the basics instead.

So what's the bottom line for location-based services?  The bottom line is that location-based networks designed around users' real motivations are the ones that will stand the test of time.  Locations and check-ins won't be able to stand alone for long, but put into a rich, multi-layered experience, they just could serve to make it that much deeper.