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This article was published on March 14, 2010

The Next Web’s Weekly Recap: Location, Location, Location


The Next Web’s Weekly Recap: Location, Location, Location

Welcome to The Next Web’s Weekly Recap.

If there was ever a week dominated by one thing it was this week: location, location, location. We launched an entire new Location blog just to cover the space. All the major players from Gowalla, foursquare, Twitter and Facebook all had announcements or new feature releases ahead of South By Southwest in Austin, Texas.

This week was all about location-based applications and services. While the trend has been a hot topic for a while, the buzz around location-based services reached a never before level this past week ahead of the South by Southwest (#sxsw) conference in Austin, Texas. The buzz around location was so big in fact, that we at The Next Web launched an entire new blog devoted to all things location – TNW Location. In order to kick off the new blog, we came up with The Declaration of Location.

As we geared up for SXSW, two of the major players in the location space both released some major updates. Foursquare’s updates focused on a much-needed UI refresh while Gowalla added a cool new feature allowing photo uploads when checking in. Foursquare also launched 16 new badges for SXSW. For a full comparison of both services, make sure to check out our extensive side-by-side comparison.

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While foursquare and Gowalla may be the most used applications in the location space right now, many others are entering the fray. Twitter has been gradually rolling out location-based features. The latest was a “tweet your location” feature from Twitter.com. Twitter also created very interesting mashup with Google Maps to see where all Twitter employees are at SXSW. However, everyone is really waiting to see how Facebook enters this space. This week it was announced that they are going to be unveiling their location sharing product next month.

The massive battle for ground in location is clearly the result of the huge revenue opportunity for the companies who can figure it out. We explored the various revenue models of location this week which estimated that location-based services will account for $12.7B in revenue by 2014.

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