MoSoSo 101: Checking in With Foursquare, Yelp and Location-Based Apps

What's it good for?
Like most new technologies, MoSoSo seems silly and unnecessary... until you and a bunch of your friends start using it. If you already status update or tweet your social life, many MoSoSo apps make it easier by both pushing updates to other networks and tagging the location. Of course, you can also see if friends are nearby, and maybe have some serendipitous meet-ups.

But it's often more interesting when the people you know are not nearby. Here's a true-life example. A pal reports on the app Foursquare: "...Ordering a Blackberry Cosmo. They're really good here. (@ Happy Ending)." Translated: If you love blackberries (the fruit), and find yourself near the bar Happy Ending in Manhattan's Lower East Side, stop in for a cosmo. By tying location to user's notes, Foursquare lets users be in-the-know without being in the neighborhood. Such serendipity isn't limited to dedicated MoSoSo apps, either. Older review services are also implementing the ability to check-in at a location, and broadcast the news to your friends. Yelp, for example, now lets you "friend" users, and follow feeds of their activities as well as reviews of restaurants and other local businesses.

MoSoSo users don't have to be friends with one another to provide helpful advice, either. Because the services know your location, they can help you find comments or reviews that anyone has posted in your vicinity. For example, food shopping in much of New York City is generally limited to overpriced, so-so grocery stores. But recently a guy on Foursquare named "Aaron M" wrote, "...on weekends there is a small farmers [sic] market near the Food Emporium selling some good stuff."

MoSoSo is also becoming a great way to find freebies and discounts, and some businesses are using the tech to lure customers with rewards. At last count, nearly 1,000 local businesses around the world – from Milwaukee, Wisconsin to Chonburi, Thailand – are offering Foursquare users special discounts, such as a free appetizer to anyone who checks in at The Drawing Room restaurant in Chicago or endless free drinks for the "Mayor" (the most-frequent visitor) of the Lush Bar in Beijing.

Other businesses are trying to steal customers from their neighbors. For example, when a coffee fan checks into a café, an alert from a bar nearby might pop up flaunting happy hour specials. It's a sneaky but effective trick.

How does it work?
Unlike with Twitter, there is no single MoSoSo company to choose. Still, Foursquare seems to be the leader these days.

In a way, Foursquare is the oldest MoSoSo. Its co-founder, Dennis Crowley, came upon a similar idea back in 2000, when he and Alex Rainert started a service (largely for dating hookups) called Dodgeball. Users would text the name of their location to Dodgeball, which looked up the address and sent a text to any friends they'd listed on the Dodgeball Web site. The dark ages before GPS and high-speed Internet connections on cellphones required that users set up the service on a PC, and then use SMS to access it. Google bought Dodgeball in 2005, let it languish, and finally shut it down in 2009. That same year, Crowley and partners founded Foursquare, and plugged in all the benefits of modern mobile tech.

Foursquare works best on a smartphone with GPS. The company currently makes apps for the iPhone, Android, BlackBerry and Palm devices, while other phones with Internet access can visit a basic Web site. The app situation is similar for Foursquare's main competitors -- Brightkite, Gowalla, Loopt and Whrrl -- all of which can be found on the iPhone. Brightkite, Gowalla and Loopt also provide Android and BlackBerry apps, while Brightkite and Gowalla offer Palm programs. Brightkite also has a Nokia app. But the winner for compatibility is Loopt, which claims support for about 100 non-smartphones, ranging form the LG Voyager to Motorola's RAZR (although downloading and installing is an arduous, counter-intuitive process).

None of these MoSoSos make you start a new social network from scratch. Instead, they let you find friends already on the services, or invite friends to join them by mining from some combination of your phone's address book, Facebook friends list, Twitter followers or Gmail contacts. (The particular combination depends on the app.) You can also link the MoSoSo apps to other networks – typically Facebook and Twitter – so that posts automatically go to all of them.