With Check-Ins Becoming Ubiquitous, Who Will Rule?

The hottest check-in play of the moment isn’t Foursquare (though its my personal favorite). It’s Monopoly-like MyTown from Booyah. More clout was recently thrown their way:

• Jim Breyer of Accel Partners, a Facebook and Walmart board member, is joining their board while Accel is leading a $20 million investment in Booyah.
• MyTown users have gone from 450,000 to nearly 2 million since January, and they now expect to have 6 million by Summer’s end. By comparison, it took Foursquare a year to reach one million users.

Meanwhile, there’s no shortage of news at Foursquare.

• The company continues to successfully enlisting new business partners, most recently NBC’s Today Show. The show unveiled its own Foursquare page and Toyota Concert attendees this summer can check in, earn badges and compete for mayorships.
• At Starbucks nation-wide, Foursquare “mayors” will now receive a $1 discount on their next Frappuccino.
• Also, news this week that Twitter client Seesmic has now integrated Foursquare checkins, which means you won’t need to use Foursquare’s dedicated smartphone app to check-in.

MyTown is looking beyong the act of checking in.

With Facebook about to join the location app space, MyTown may be right that a different spin beyond the checkin will become the differentiator.  They’re betting that the gaming aspect of MyTown will create an unforgettable experience to help achieve customer loyalty.

Facebook’s move awaited next.

Keep in mind that rumors still abound that Facebook may either acquire or partner with Foursquare, which could explain the delay in the their location deployment, which was expected last month.  Facebook may be betting that omnipotence will rule location apps and that the shear force of nearly 500 million users will be all that’s needed for dominance.

In the interim, Facebook has partnered with McDonalds as their featured partner for its upcoming location feature roll-out.

The future of location aware applications appears very bright (and competitive).  It just isn’t clear who is going to lead and what will make that final determination.  It’s definitely a space to get involved in and start using so that you won’t miss this huge plane’s take-off.

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