Gowalla, FourSquare or HotPotato?  Digitally, Location Is Where It’s” At Geo-location was the hottest thing at SXSW

Gowalla, FourSquare or HotPotato? Digitally, Location Is Where It’s” At Geo-location was the hottest thing at SXSW

Tweeted about this today.

Digitally, Location Is Where It’s” At Geo-location was the hottest thing at SXSW http://nyti.ms/9fyov9

At SWSX the theme was definitely location, location, location.  The confusion most of us had was which application do I use and better yet…which one will our friends be on?  FourSquare was the most prominent even though local sensation Gowalla had the homecourt advantage.

The Gowalla CEO was a no-show in front of an large audience expecting a heated debate with FourSquare co-founder Dennis Crowley.  This was a big mistake to leave 100+ iphone toting twitter-heads waiting and wondering.   Mr. Crowley definitely stole the show and I overheard many of the attendees were pondering the demise of their Gowalla application.

IMHO none of this matters much at all.  Once Twitter, Apple’s iGroup and Facebook become more location-aware these new startups may become fossils on the internet ocean floor.   After all who needs another application to log into?

What do you think?

Dennis from FourSquare made a good case as to why B2B loyalty programs should remain interested in FourSquare.  Given the kind of metrics on behaviour they will be able to aggregate.  Wouldn’t a restaurant want to know when their “best” customer comes in the door or even their “worst” critic.  I hope Mr. Crowley introduced himself to the Bazaarvoice CMO, Sam Decker ( fellow speaker at event) because I think their apps have some great syngergy.

Enough of my rant…check them out yourselves here:

http://foursquare.com/

http://gowalla.com/

http://hotpotato.com/

Thanks for reading!