When I saw most of my social circle using location based social applications I figured, why not give it a shot? After all, I use Twitter and I do rather enjoy that – maybe there will be some appeal to this. I must say prior to even trying location based social applications such as Foursquare and Gowalla I was skeptical. The appeal wasn’t there for me. My first thought was, “So I go somewhere and then I have to check-in to where I am to confirm that I am there? Seems a bit… well dumb.” Friends of mine replied back with, “No no! It’s cool because you can see everyone else who is there and where your friends are!” Which I then thought “If I am there don’t I already see everyone else who is already there? And if someone is my friend and they wanted me to go with them somewhere they would have asked me no?” So clearly, I didn’t see the appeal nor was I very receptive. Regardless, I decided to try out both Foursquare and Gowalla to see if there was something there. There wasn’t.

Maybe it’s the type of person I am, maybe I just don’t get it but none of these location based social applications served a purpose for me. Here are my major qualms with them:

They are not about me or my friends.  - Say what you want, but they’re truly about the places where you are visiting. It’s about the place you’re visiting and about being at that place. I can see how this benefits the location but how does it benefit me? It doesn’t.

They are a CHORE – I don’t know if it’s out of habit that most people check-in when they go somewhere but let me tell you I found it unbelievably hard to check-in to ANY location I went to. In fact, if I didn’t tell myself at the start of the day check in at locations I wouldn’t. Not only did I not like checking-in it didn’t feel rewarding what so ever. When I tweet I get replies, other people RT what I typed, and I know that there is visibility.

Not accurate enough service – GPS location services on our “smart media” are still not great enough for me to actually want to use any location based service that has to be so precise. Attempting to check-in somewhere where you clearly are and your device telling you you’re not there is annoying, frustrating, and down right discouraging. I don’t even want to think of using either Foursquare or Gowalla after one of these experiences.

What reward? None. - I don’t care if you’re the mayor of Starbucks or your local trendy cafe. Good for you, you go there a lot. Nor do I want to take your mayorship away or really have any plans to go somewhere every day, remember to check in, and try to take away your mayorship. As for rewards for checking in from the location I do see this as a more appropriate path but don’t see it being scaleable just yet.

In the end, I think Foursquare and Gowalla will develop into something I might want to use however their focus seems to be on elements on which the service itself is built around and that is the location. Once Foursquare and Gowalla start to see that as the main focal point, I feel that it could be an interesting service.