The animation reveals a check-in silo situation similar to the wireless carrier location data islands prior to aggregation services such as Veriplace. The difference however is there are only a handful of wireless carriers, but an ever-growing list of smartphone apps on virtual shelf-spaces stocked by abundant app choice which will inevitably lead to even more check-in fragments of mobile location available on the Web, therefore building a good case for a check-in Social Location in the Cloud aggregation service similar to Veriplace. 

Check-in Buzz

Foursquare, Gowalla, and others fueled a mobility and mobile location buzz at Where 2.0 and in the larger Web and Geo communities now including mainstream social media circles. Google’s VP of Geo Products John Hanke said "the check-in had energized the conference." During his talk, Othman Laraki, Director of Geo at Twitter validated the energy and said he wants to a) create a frictionless way for people to associate context to tweets, and b) allow users or developers to consume real-time information based on context. Longer term ambitions include associating tweets in context with other hyperlocal descriptive semantic naming conventions and geographic boundaries, plus deriving new geodata from harvested clusters of tweets defining social and cultural neighborhoods from recurring geographic name mentions. In his on-stage interview with Yelp's Jeremy Stoppelman, Brady Forrest's utterance "...you're also doing check-ins?" and his subtle but poignant follow-on, "a feature is a feature," sums up the current state of the check-in--a simple feature--now becoming common attribution to most social updates. From what I've seen over time, most mobile location technologies, apps, and services eventually become features of larger core offerings, and I struggle to imagine immunity for the check-in. 

Combining Wireless and Social Location 

Facebook's Engineering Manager of Mobile, Dave Fetterman, cited scale and subscriber reach as main objectives in bridging the Web and mobile divide as part of Facebook's mobile priorities. While smartphone touch experiences offer one high-end mode to interact and publish contextual status updates, Fetterman said in clear and no uncertain terms "the meaty middle" using lower common denominator modes such as SMS and the mobile Web are as core to Facebook's focus as interactive touch experiences, validating a need for a combined approach using both smartphone check-ins and wireless location services such as those offered by Veriplace. Beyond a need to combine these disparate approaches, I also wonder how much longer will it be before larger social nets such as Facebook develop their own check-in capabilities for touch experiences. A feature is a feature.