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"A number of very smart people believe that the winner in geosocial will be the company that is able to provide the most financial incentives to check in.\r\n\r\nAnd it\u2019s not just talk. \u00A0Many of the leading lbs apps are racing to provide the infrastructure that will allow check-in rewards to propagate.\r\n\r\nGowalla just added self serve claim and deal creation for local merchants. \u00A0SCVNGR is trumpeting their 12,000 locations offering rewards, and Foursquare, of course, has stated that they see reinventing local coupons as one of their core missions.\r\n\r\nIt\u2019s hard to dispute the logic. \u00A0Why on earth would people voluntarily publish their location if not to get free stuff?\r\n\r\nWell, here\u2019s one medium where the paid incentives model didn\u2019t win.\r\n\r\nThe Web.\r\n\r\nSince the original Internet bubble of the late 1990s, there have been a steady stream of companies attempting to grab market share by paying users to engage. \u00A0iWon.com was a search engine that paid you to search (a tactic later copied by search also ran Microsoft.) \u00A0We\u2019ve also see paid reviews sites (hey, I founded that one), paid social networking sites, paid status updates, paid blogging sites, paid video upload services, and pay to surf companies.\r\n\r\nWhat\u2019s interesting is that none of these companies won their category.\r\n\r\nSearch was won by Google, which doesn\u2019t pay you to search. \u00A0Reviews was won by Amazon and Yelp, which don\u2019t pay you to post reviews. \u00A0Social networking was won by Facebook which doesn\u2019t pay you to add photos and content. \u00A0Status updates was won by Twitter, which doesn\u2019t pay you to tweet. \u00A0Blogging was won by Blogger and Wordpress, neither of which pay you (though Blogger does offer some rev sharing). \u00A0Video was won by YouTube, which only recently launched revenue sharing. \u00A0And pay to surf? \u00A0Well, most people just surf.\r\n\r\nNobody\u2019s denying that there\u2019s a murky little corner of the web where \u201Cget paid while you surf the web!\u201D thrives - we\u2019ve all seen the blog spam. \u00A0But the point is these services haven\u2019t won - far from it. \u00A0On the web, end users have resoundingly chosen user experience, utility, and scale over paid rewards.\r\n\r\nWhich brings me to geolocation. \u00A0I see location sharing as two parts self expression, one part utility, one part game, and one part urban diary. \u00A0People that I know who are prolific users of check in services aren\u2019t in it for the money. \u00A0\u00A0They\u2019re in it because they express themselves through the places they go, they like the idea of serendipitous meetups, they like keeping track of the places they\u2019ve been, and increasingly, they\u2019re hooked on the game mechanics. \u00A0I don\u2019t know anybody who does it for the free stuff.\r\n\r\n(But then again I don\u2019t know anyone who uses coupons, but Valpak does a few hundred million in revenue a year).\r\n\r\nSo what\u2019s it going to be? \u00A0Is the geosocial landscape a fierce little skirmish to see who takes some of Valpak\u2019s coupon revenue?\r\n\r\nOr is location more fundamental than an exciting new coupon delivery channel?\r\n\r\nMy suspicion is this: we are just scratching the service in terms of how location will be integrated into existing behaviors, and that the market and use cases for geosocial are far broader than the coupon delivery race that we are now witnessing.\r\n\r\nWith many of the fledgeling geo startups seemingly focused on local coupons, perhaps there is an opportunity for some new perspectives to emerge."^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://thenextweb.com/apps/2010/10/27/geolocation-what-if-its-not-all-about-the-money/>