Four Squared Signs You Are a Foursquare Addict

For the last two months, I've been openly discussing my experimentation with Foursquare, logging my location at all sorts of places throughout my travels, and - gasp - even discussing the fact I cheat, while noting others may not be cheating, but they sure are leaving a lot of stops out. While my conversation with product manager Siobhan Quinn helped to provide some relevance to this whole process, I am still playing along.

While I am enjoying myself with my nonsense checkin stream, there are some surefire ways to tell people are taking location apps far too seriously. Here are 16 ways (Four squared, get it?) that I know you've got a problem. If I missed any, please do let me know.

1. You know exactly how far away you have to be from a venue before you can check in, and also know how many different venues you can check into without leaving your house.
2. If your phone is out of batteries, you return home to charge it instead of doing errands because you want to check in to those places once you go.
3. You take the same routes to and from work so you can check in at various offices along the way, hoping to obtain mayorships without actually getting out of your car.
4. You heavily consider or discuss with friends the benefits of going to a place where you are already mayor to boost your stats against going somewhere new to increase the number of venues.
5. You set up or check in at venues for locations without buildings, such as "Highway 101" or actual people.
6. You not only know what a "Super Swarm" is, but you can name every single one that has occurred.
7. The Foursquare icon is in both your iPhone and iPad dock.
8. If you not only achieved the Overshare badge with 10 checkins in 12 hours, but you wonder why the bar was set so low.
9. You opened a gym membership and started working out just to get the Gym Rat badge. (Or complain when you don't get it)
10. You recognize locals in your area who are Mayors of multiple places, and aggressively start searching Google to learn their weaknesses.
11. If you actively have scouted all the nearby parks and are visiting them one by one, just to score the Babysitter badge.
12. You wonder why you can't "Check in" that somebody called you on the phone, or that you accomplished basic tasks at the office.
13. You refuse to meet with people unless they agree to check in at Foursquare with you.
14. You get annoyed when you go to friends' homes that don't have Foursquare venues.
15. You actively debate the merits of Foursquare over Gowalla and Brightkite to anyone who will listen.
16. You set your alarm for after 3 a.m. on a weekday just to roll over and grab your phone to check in and grab the School Night badge.

If you don't mind seeing my silliness, and want to show me you are a Foursquare addict, check-in here: http://foursquare.com/user/lgloco. The "loco" stands for crazy.

Edge Theory Conversations: Location's Impact & Cheating

With the world of location based services, including Foursquare and Gowalla, getting a lot of discussion of late, especially as news comes that Facebook will soon check in with its own offering, Louis Gray and Chris Saad discuss the purpose today's services serve, and how we both leverage Foursquare - the current app of choice.

Are these services here to stay, and should they be used to show all of one's comings and goings, or just major points of interest? Chris argues Foursquare should be used in a social way, while Louis is enjoying checking in from the mundane places in life. Meanwhile, we debate the true nature of "cheating", and whether it is acceptable or not.

Much of this discussion stems my recent post: Are You Filtering Checkins to Enhance Your Image?

Referenced in addition to Foursquare, Gowalla and Facebook are Twitter, Stalqer and The Cadmus. Chris is an advisor to Stalqer.

This and all other EdgeTheory conversations can be found on the dedicated ET Conversations site.

Listen to the full recording below:

Are You Filtering Your Checkins To Enhance Your Image?

A month or so ago, I told you how I'd finally jumped on the location check-in train, and mockingly asked if boring married people (like me) should be checking in on services like Foursquare and Gowalla. In the time since that post, I continue to be married, continue to be boring, and yes, I continue to check in. I believe that if one is truly going to commit themselves to a tool like this, they should do so in full. But from what I have seen, it looks like many people edit their comings and goings, in an effort to obscure the mundane, or possibly to make their average lives appear exemplary. And by going against the grain, I am becoming the unequalled Mayor of Mediocre.

As anticipated when I started my smirk-laden quest to prove the utility (or lack thereof) of location apps, I quickly gained mayorship of client offices up and down the Peninsula, and even in the East Bay. I picked up a crown at a supermarket in Woodside with only two stops and never looked back, and at one point, I achieved every man's dream - becoming mayor of a Burger King and Wendy's simultaneously. My mother must be so proud.

Yay me! Told You I Was Boring.

Because I decided I would use Foursquare to accurately show just where I go and what I do, I've racked up plenty of stops at the neighborhood Safeway, and even recently became the mayor of my kids' pediatrician's office (again after only two stops). Given the combination of relatively low use of such apps in the South Bay, and my own antisocial behavior, the overlap with other friend's activity has been inconsistent at best - and the lack of a challenge in overtaking these mundane places was due to what I believe is self-censoring on the part of many users, who don't really want to broadcast to the world what it is they are doing.

While I may have no hesitation in reporting I am at 7-Eleven, or pumping gas, or shopping for groceries, or asking the docs to look into my son's fever, and check in from the Drive Thru at McDonald's, many of those I am connected to are keeping their own check-in history to be more hipster friendly. One still sees the Friday night flurry as the singles chase each other from bar to bar, the self-important announcements of major travel from state to state, check-ins at "happening" venues and events, or at more classy restaurants than the grease pits I'm owning.

This sounds like fun. But is it representative?

But what's missing are the rest of the small updates. Post offices. Dry cleaners. Car rentals. Clothing stores. It looks like it's a lot more hip to check into an Apple Store than a Ross or a Mervyn's, or a Starbucks instead of a Jack in the Box.

Everyone Else's Life? More exciting?

The self-censorship and muting of life's reality adds cloak of dissonance to the entire process. While it's true I am still playing with checking in at random Apple buildings in Cupertino in an attempt to draw out Steve Jobs' henchmen, and thus have my own issues with "telling the truth", I wonder what those who are holding back on their check-ins are trying to hide. Do you think you're going to bore your friends with who you really are?

Good news for us. But it could have been bad.

One more thing - sharing your real life can have real life benefits. This week, when at Lucile Packard Children's Hospital for a 20-week ultrasound on our Fall addition to the family, I got an e-mail from a friend who had very real concern that maybe one of our kids had taken a turn for the worse. (See his writeup: Privacy vs Voyeurism) The world of virtual check-ins turned into a real one. If you become real, and share who you really are, you can get real-world connections with real people who really care, so stop hiding and stop filtering.

Should Boring Married People Check In On Location Apps?

I've been watching the buildup around location and check-ins with some level of interest over the last year or so, mixed with some thinly veiled skepticism. While my tendency at times has been to mock the entire practice of reporting one's location from stop to stop, gaining real-time updates on friends' locations, and competing for virtual badges intended to improve one's self-worth, I've for the most part kept quiet about the whole thing - lest I find myself forced to eat my words as I doubled back and used something I might have sworn I would never do.

For the most part, the excitement around Foursquare, Gowalla and other similar applications has centered on two elements - the fun, social side that spikes when a group of mostly single friends participates in something like an informal barcrawl in an urban center, such as San Francisco, or the potential for businesses to gain information about their most-frequent customers, returning with favors such as coupons or specials for loyal guests. The expectation is that with time, Foursquare and Gowalla (and their competitors) will gain so many users battling for badges and other privileges that this mass data will become actionable and useful. And for whatever reason, users will continue broadcasting their location, manually or automatically, largely due to game theory and sheer competitiveness.


My Scintillating Foursquare History and a New Mayorship!

For me, as I've watched this phenomenon, expecting to be dragged into it kicking and screaming, fingernails digging a rut in the ground, I've always wondered if this is the front of a battle that doesn't have a place for otherwise socially active people like me who happen to be married, don't drink, have kids, and generally don't do much exciting enough to check in at constantly. In February of 2009, speaking about Brightkite, I said I wasn't using these apps because I was simply too boring, not because of any privacy risk. At the time I joked about checking in to home, church or lunch, or even at a micro-level, checking in from the couch, the fridge, or the kids' room. And after some testing of Foursquare in the last month, that's not too far off from the truth.

As I've used Foursquare exclusively in the last few weeks, the discussion will largely be framed by my experience there, and your own experience with other apps may differ.

How pervasive is Foursquare?

If you read some headlines, you would think it was a phenomenon sweeping the nation, starting with the urban centers, and flowing outward. The company reported it was rapidly advancing toward a million unique users, having grown six figures alone at the recent South by Southwest conference, which I attended in Austin, Texas. But even here in the San Francisco Bay Area, I've routinely found businesses that are unlisted in the service, or have had close to zero activity, a year into the app's existence. I've added restaurants, department stores and office buildings. I even found myself named mayor of a grocery store in upscale Woodside, California after only two visits there in a three-day period.


Other Foursquare Users Run the Apple Store and Apple Campus

If the assumption is that Foursquare is growing and being used all over the place, it seemingly hasn't gotten all the way down the peninsula. If San Francisco venues are hard to claim and become Mayor for, it's pretty much a breeze around Woodside, Sunnyvale, Milpitas and Cupertino. And in practically every case where I checked in, I was the only person at that venue, with the exception being the Valley Fair Apple Store Saturday afternoon on iPad launch day.

I can only imagine that as you move further inland toward less populated areas, you could easily be the only person using the app, effectively doing battle with yourself alone.

How accurate is Foursquare?

I have read a lot of notes talking about how easy it is to cheat on Foursquare - as people used Web tools to check in across the country, or even scripts to make themselves atop the charts for notable venues worldwide. And if Foursquare were to accurately show where people were, you would see a lot more mundane or even seedy updates. It's a wonder people never check in at strip clubs, laundromats, or adult bookstores. The truth is that many people no doubt sanitize their checkins to present a good face of who they are to their contemporaries.

Meanwhile, checking in to places where you actually haven't set foot is very simple. Foursquare does a very good job guessing your location, and if there are venues in the area, you can pull down and select from the list where you want to check in. This works even if you're driving (so long as the CHP doesn't see you). So, for kicks, I've checked in at places like Hitachi Data Systems or Palm Computing without even slowing down at an intersection. And if you have a frequent route to and from the office, it's possible you can check in enough times at a place on the way to get Mayorship. I've already checked in at the Executive Briefing Center at Apple headquarters in Cupertino twice. I wonder if I keep turning on De Anza from South 280 if I can gain Mayorship without even being invited...


Only 7 Check-ins From 5 People Made Me The Mayor After 2.

Similarly, my home location, called "LG Land", where I am mayor (Duh), shows one other guy has checked in, who I know has never set foot in my home. It could be he was going quickly and thought it read "Golf Land", for the miniature golf course down the street, but there's no way for me to log into Foursquare and negate his checkin, just like Apple can't kick me out of the records of their EBC.

Also, there are many places where it makes sense not to check in at all - such as friends' residences. We took our kids Easter Egg hunting this afternoon at a couple's home. Rather than add them as a new venue, it made more sense to check in at the park next door to give an idea of where we were, without being 100 percent accurate. Better than nothing?

How Interesting Is Foursquare?

Taking into account the above notes on accuracy and the opportunity for cheating, my experience with Foursquare has been much as I had anticipated. I am unsurprisingly mayor not only of my home, but also of Paladin Advisors Group (a new venue) and client offices in the South Bay. I secured mayorship of Robert's in Woodside after two visits, and have checked in multiple times at church, Safeway, gas stations and some parks in the area.


My Foursquare Buds Are Just As Boring As Me

My feed, just like my actual travel history, is therefore pretty uninspiring. That's a major reason I set up a parallel Twitter account (@lgloco) for Foursquare, rather than muddy my regular feed with those updates. I've tried to avoid self-mockery with the mundane nature of my updates, but instead to give it a fair shake, checking in where I really am, no matter the critical need to broadcast it.

But I'm not the only one. To be honest, the vast majority of your updates aren't that brilliant either - with stops at Ikea, Best Buy and the barber shop being among those I've seen friends update in the last day or so. So where then is the appeal of instant knowledge? I can get why you might want to know if a business is "trending" in an area, or if you guys are at a hot club and I'm not, but may want to join you. But if you're getting your hair cut, I'm not suddenly going to show up and ask for a trim and I'm not going to try and get a bulk rate on make-it-yourself bunk beds at Ikea.

Trust me, there are times where I've thought of Foursquare having real utility. When delayed at the Denver airport on the way to SXSW last month, I wondered if others I knew were in the same airport stuck with me. And I scanned the list of seven folks at the Apple Store Saturday to see if there was anybody I knew. Of course, there wasn't. But these are rare exceptions.

If you want to announce you're at a party with three friends, you can just as easily put a note on Twitter with the user names of your three buds as checking in simultaneously. And keep in mind as a boring married guy with kids, I'd be more likely to check in with my twin toddlers at home than any place else.

So Is It Me Or Is It The App?

Despite the above, I'm not resentful of Foursquare and have found some of the mechanisms fairly entertaining. If I don't take myself too seriously, checking in at a Shell station or a Taco Bell or a client site isn't too much trouble and you know I'm always smirking when I do it. And being a numbers and charts guy, I do like scrolling through my stats on Foursquare to see the day I check in the most and averages. Any time you can take activity and turn it into stats or trends, you've got my attention.


Note More than Half My Checkins Are At New Places

But I am not gaining a ton from the real social aspects of the app. I watch Brian Remmel and Brian Solis go to and from FutureWorks. I watch Denton Gentry and his family check in off the grid presumably around the East Bay. I see random Googlers frequent their favorite restaurants. For the most part, they're as boring as me.

I'm not putting on a curmudgeon's crown and dismissing the app or the trend. It seems to be taking hold, at least for the digerati, and I've wholly embraced similar publicly revealing sites, including Blippy and all the various social networks. I am enjoying being as boring as humanly possible and telling you all about it - because it's more accurate than any facade I could give you. After all, we couldn't be nearly as productive online if we were away from the computer all the time. If I really were out there checking in to bar after bar overnight, it'd be a different story, and a different person outright.

Now, if you don't mind, I need to check in at home. If you think that's interesting, you can find me on Foursquare at http://foursquare.com/user/lgloco. The "loco" is intentional.

Users vs. Companies: Conflicts over the Real-Time Web?

If 2009 was the year of real-time Web, with practically every major service finding ways to bring content to its users instantly, 2010 is about optimizing the new real-time world, expanding interoperability between sites, finding more ways for users' content to be discovered, and taking the potential of real-time out of the status world and into the real world. Today, at the South by Southwest Interactive event in Austin, Texas, one panel asked if we were making serious progress in this vision, and if companies, feeling increased competitive pressures, are short-changing users in the process.

Marshall Kirkpatrick of ReadWriteWeb, who moderated the panel, featuring representatives from Collecta, Google, Gowalla and Microsoft, said "the real-time Web is a big, complex and multi-headed beast," adding, "almost as many people you talk to on the subject will give a different perspective."

For most, the real-time Web represents reducing latency from the time updates are published and when they are experienced practically to zero. This can be anything from updates from blogs to downstream aggregators and RSS feed readers, status updates from social networks to other points in the ecosystem, or instant alerts from the Web at large that a saved search you requested has found a positive match.

But one of the existing problems with the real-time Web that has occurred is that despite the focus by many services to solve the same problem, many have done so without delivering true data interoperability - and other services are trying to solve for real-time without having full access to users' public data.

"Back in the day, you couldn't send e-mail from AOL to Compuserve, and today, you can't send data from Google Buzz to Facebook," said Brett Slatkin of Google's App Engine team, and co-author of Pubsubhubbub. "Part of what we are trying to work on is breaking down these barriers that connect to different sites. If I am on Buzz and Marshall is on Identica and Jack is on Twitter, we should all be able to communicate."

Standards have evolved in the real-time Web space, from OAuth to PubSububbub, WebFinger and Salmon (as documented here), but that's not to say there aren't still heated debates over these standards, or even which version of standards should be supported. (See this article for a discussion of OAuth 2.0)

"I try to be a practical person, and when I hear about a family of specifications, it sounds like a family of work," said Dare Obasanjo of Microsoft. "There is clearly a place where we have a common pain that we can work on. There is a bunch of shared pain, and the way you have to get real-time service is to work on APIs, and that is a clear starting point for standards. Pubsubhubbub can help solve that problem, but I get concerned when you have to implement certain specs to solve that problem."

"These specifications we agree on should be useful on their own," answered Slatkin. "When you implement a specification like HTML, you are not buying into an ideology."

As the real-time Web's protocols are debated and deployed, so too does the application of these services. Google Buzz and Facebook have received scrutiny for their aggressiveness in converting assumed private data to public, and Netflix recently canceled an algorithm development contest thanks to concerns of assumed privacy violations.

"When talking about privacy, right now, unfortunately, the social networking market is failing, and they have little incentive to encourage user privacy," said Obasanjo. "I am waiting to see when people find what they thought were private updates as part of trending topics on Google and Bing. Users and companies are in conflict."

Obasanjo gave the example of Twitter needing its users to be public in order to drive value into the system. After all, if users were all private, there would be no trending topics, and thus it is Twitter's best interests for updates to be public. "There is a factor that if a user wants to be private, it subtracts value from the system," he said.

Beyond these concerns, known benefits of the real-time Web are scratching the surface of what could be done with more expanded to real-time data from other sources, it was argued. Slatkin forecast a time where you could query supply chains for inventory and purchase locally instead of from Amazon.com, turning economies of scale on their head. Scott Raymond of Gowalla talked about intersecting real-time Web technologies with geodata to show trending locations and the hot parties of the moment, by decaying the relevance of checkins over time. Jack Moffitt, CTO of Collecta, said a development environment for new tools and applications that leveraged zero latency was becoming "very interesting".

"All these guys are working on realizing the potential right now, working on real-time data," Kirkpatrick said. "Brett Slatkin said it was important people focus on the unforseen future that systems we worked on to support undiscovered use cases - things are going to get real crazy real soon."

Web-wide adoption of RSS and Atom standards has eliminated the problem of publishers providing their data, and tools like Pubsubhubbub are working to get data from one site to another faster. "Polling doesn't scale and you need a push notification to deliver it. It's possible we will have multiple winners, and we have to consider privacy considerations that people won't want their data available to everyone," said Moffitt.

The element of real-time is being layered across the Web, and it seems to be happening even if developers aren't completely in agreement over the tools needed to optimize the experience or if the debates on privacy versus public data are solved. And there's a lot of room for real-time to grow outside of the statusphere and to more traditional markets. The question is can developers provide solutions that don't have users running to the FCC?

Google Buzz Mobile Moves Beyond Latitude/Longitude

In addition to the morning's news that Google had launched Buzz as a major social push for Gmail, the company, in parallel, announced a new Web application for mobile devices, supporting both Android and iPhone platforms, that not only brings Buzz to the mobile phone, but also adds Buzz to the company's existing Maps application, showing Buzz from activity in your specific location. Leveraging the years of investments in Google Earth, Google Maps, Google StreetView and other location-based services, Google Buzz immediately ships with an advantage - determining the true identity of a location, beyond simple longitude and latitude coordinates.

As the much-hyped Foursquare and Gowalla applications have shown us over the last year, an individual's location is often as relevant as whatever activity is taking place. Google Buzz for mobile taps into the vast Earth, Maps and Street View database the company has been building over the last half-decade, and lets you post to Buzz with your update attached to the place where you are located, not just with a latitude/longitude coordinate, or even worse, an IP address.

"In the digital world, few have gotten this right," said Vic Gundotra, vice president of engineering at Google on Monday. "We don't want latitude/longitude, we want the colloquial term. We have solved this problem, of a conversation in a world of places, and mobile phones make it possible."

As Gundotra demoed to me at Google headquarters Monday on his Android-powered Google Nexus One handset, speaking into the phone made an automatic transcription, which could be posted to his Buzz, attached to the location he had selected. Tapping into Google's deep archives about places, establishments feature images of the location, details about that location, and relevant data, such as restaurant reviews, if applicable.

By selecting the "Nearby" option in his Buzz-enabled Maps application, Gundotra could also see what people were Buzzing about in the surrounding area.

The move to add geolocation is one trend that is growing for mobile applications and Twitter clients, although not many Twitter users have enabled such data sharing. If they do, and they pull their Tweets into Buzz, the product doesn't yet pull in that information to Mobile Maps, but it soon will, Gundotra promised.

Can We Live In Private and Demand Companies Be Open?

The growth of social services enables us to share an ever-increasing granularity of our lives with complete strangers who opt in to sample our updates. From traditional blogging to Twitter to location sharing services, and now, Blippy (which displays my purchases online and lets me follow others' spending habits), I can live my life open and transparent, letting you know what I like, what I do, where I go, and how I spend my time. In parallel, we are also asking businesses to be more open. Thanks to SEC regulations and Sarbanes-Oxley, as well as best practices, we expect public companies to tell us how much money they have, how much profit they made, where they made that money, how many employees they have, how much they intend to make next quarter, and a blizzard of other things that fall under the guise of information.

Now, we're even asking some companies to open up their kimono and blog themselves, to respond on a personal level with Twitter and other social networks, or open source their code, and let us know who their investors and partners are, lest we find they may have some bias. So yes, it's easy to see that open, open, open, is the word of the day.

This Week's Target: Facebook

Looking at these trends, it seems clear to me that the overriding move in both personal and business is to remove barriers and enable more visibility into activity. Yet, there are still pockets on the Web who see the data they share as needing to be under lock and key. The most recent kerfuffle was flamed by the often independent Marshall Kirkpatrick, who slammed Facebook's CEO Mark Zuckerberg for moving the once-closed social network toward increased openness, and reduction of what he termed "privacy". While others, notably TechCrunch's Mike Arrington, thought that argument to be overblown, Kirkpatrick followed that post with another line of questioning, asking how we would react if, for example, Google revealed our contacts in GMail and our subscriptions in Google Reader.

In the non-connected life, one was always taught that there were a few things one does not ask about in polite company - including politics, one's salary, and sex. Yet, the Web has made finding out most of those things very obvious for public members of society. We know what the vice presidents of many companies make, and we know the dollar amounts on contracts. We can do searches online and discover what political parties people are registered to, and where they put their money in the last elections and fundraising cycles.

Forget Location. Who Have You Slept With?

Although I was only joking, somewhat, I suggested to a friend this week that a new social networking service should be introduced that updates your stream with your sexual partners, and encounters, complete with their partner history and total number of partners. Given some's willingness to post all their data online, and the rising casual nature of some behavior, this isn't so far out of reach to be completely ridiculous. Just think of what message that would send if you were the "mayor" of multiple places on that particular network?

Yet, before that level of debauchery occurs, we still have to recognize that the trend Zuckerberg and his team are recognizing is true. The first rule of sharing things online is to expect that they will be discoverable by search engines and viewable by anyone. Even the closed, secure, password-only sites are usually potential victims for copy/paste, and are always susceptible to screenshots.

From Anonymous to Open. We're Getting There.

I understand the Internet's roots require a level of privacy, and you see many people still clinging to the antiquated hope of anonymity, assuming one can hide behind a user name and avatar to mask their true identity. I understand the concerns some have that the more data which is shared online makes them more vulnerable offline. But I am seeing prominent people talk out of both sides of their mouth when they claim to push companies to get more open and more transparent, while at the same time, clinging to the hope that we can push our content into a safe place on the Web and consider it "private".

During the week's discussions around Facebook and privacy, Marshall had some solid points, in his comments on TechCrunch, saying that people were joining groups and "fan pages" on the social network that had to deal with sensitive personal issues, such as infertility or friends of same-sex couples. His concern was that this data would be surfaced and revealed in a way that was not desired. In a week of drum-banging and emotion, I thought those examples to be the most reasoned. It makes sense, then, that sites like Facebook make the ability to hide certain affiliations from public view if so desired. If I chose to sign up and follow Fox News, and not want my left-leaning friends on Facebook to know, then I should have that option to hide the details from my page. But to fight against the tide of open in our own lives while demanding the tide of open be ever loosened when it comes to the companies we engage with seems bizarrely silly. Let's pick one and stick with it. If you don't trust the companies, then why should we trust you? What are you hiding?

Of note, and I mentioned this in comments to ReadWriteWeb, the notion of Facebook data being private is in itself the exception rather than the rule. You can see my Twitter stream and who I follow or don't, just as you can with FriendFeed and other networks. I have chosen to share my Google Reader feeds with you on Toluu and encourage others to do the same. The world is trending open and transparent, and you can embrace that or you can fight until you are blue in the face. But choose a side.

Stalqer's Location Sharing App Hits iTunes Store

After a November preview of Stalqer, a location sharing application which connects you to your existing Facebook social graph, the application underwent a notoriously lengthy review cycle by the nice folks at the Apple iTunes Store. More than a month later, the program is now available for free download - joining the fray alongside more visible players Foursquare and Gowalla for geolocation.

(Download Stalqer from this iTunes link)



My Location and Friends' Updates on Stalqer

As noted in November, Stalqer is less about owning a specific venue and showing the frequency of visits. Instead, it operates around real friend connections, through Facebook, highlighting others' current locations, and their updates over time. You can even get Push notifications for specific friends, if you want notes on where they are at all times.

Gowalla Raises $8.4 Million for Location Check-in Service

Much of the talk from LeWeb and other Silicon Valley get-togethers of late has centered around geolocation and the future of how geolocation is going to be integrated in social activity, search, advertising and communication. To date, the most visible company centered on geolocation has been Foursquare. But Gowalla, based in Austin, Texas, has gained significant traction over the last three months, and today, announced the completion of a Series B funding round for more than $8 million, bringing their total funding to date to more than $10 million.

According to the company's press release, Greylock Partners led the round, which will be used to accelerate the company's growth and enable future development.

Despite Foursquare's share of voice, Gowalla has managed to attract 50,000 active users, who have checked in at 150,000 locations in nearly 100 countries. Unlike Foursquare, which requires the service to support specific cities, Gowalla users can participate anywhere they are connected. Gowalla is available for both Apple's iPhone and the Android platform, and all this growth has taken place in only ten weeks.

In contrast, Foursquare raised $1.35 million in September of 2009.