Tessa Horehled | Strategic Marketer, Community Manager, Brand Strategist, Digital Communications Specialist | ATL / NYC

Geolocation – Kickball, Checkin Mania and How To Survive

Geolocation applications and services are one of the most buzzed about trends in the social space right now. I currently check in on Foursquare, Gowalla and Yelp every place I go. (It’s a little ridiculous.)

“Geolocation is the identification of the real-world geographic location of an Internet-connected computer, mobile device, website visitor or other.” Source: Wikipedia

With the upheaval of geo options on the table, a number of third-parties are now trying to streamline and improve on user-experience leveraging existing APIs.

Some reads from early this week on geolocation:

• Kickball Looks to Punt Foursquare’s iPhone App to the Curb (The Next Web)
• Foursquare, Gowalla and More on a Google Map [Apps] (Mashable)
• How to Survive Geolocation’s Looming Apocalypse (Ad Age)

In other random news of the week, Ricky Martin has come out of the closet and new iPhone rumors have me hopeful of replacing my cracked 3G model this June.

Brightkite iPhone Application

Finally!  A Brightkite application for the iPhone:

Brightkite is a location-based social network. In real time you can see where your friends are and what they’re up to. Depending on your privacy settings you can also meet others nearby.

I use it often via text message or mobile browser but this will be greatly helpful moving forward and likely increase my usage of the site due to it’s ease. I also use Brightkite to update my Twitter profile‘s location. One thing I like about Brightkite over similar services is the ability to upload photos and notes in correlation with the most location you have checked in to. You are also able to set up your Brightkite profile to post all of your posts to your Twitter profile and have filtering options to determine which types of posts to push.