GeoLocation Is Hot, and Imperfect

I've been using both services for a year, and before them I used Brightkite.I knew why I liked Brightkite: I could go on a hike, take a photo of the trail, and post it to my profile and–if I wanted to–to my Twitter account. It was fun showing my Phoenix friends my Half Moon Bay life, and vice versa. For me, Brightkite was always dependable. Unfortunately, it lost momentum to Foursquare, which had a couple of cool components: you could become Mayor of a venue, and conversely you could oust someone else, you could add venues, and you could unlock badges.  Foursquare also has a leaderboard, so you can compete with friends for how many times you check in. (The bike messengers always win.)

Foursquare was followed by Gowalla, which has prettier badges and icons you can collect. Also a beautiful interface. Good design always gives a new product a leg up, although it's not enough by itself to create a market leader.

Like everyone else, I went crazy during SXSW trying to check in everywhere, so when the Check.in beta opened, I signed up for that, too. (At about this time, I turned off notifications to my Twitter and Facebook accounts from all the geo-location services, because my friends were complaining while I was trying to play pointless games.)

Check.in, an iPhone app, is Brightkite's attempt to return to the competition. With Check.in, you can check into  Brightkite, Foursquare, and Gowalla simultaneously. That is, you can check in simultaneously IF Check.in opens, WHEN it can find the venues on all three sites through its "magical place matching," and IF geo-location is working properly. I've had difficulty getting Check.in to start, to locate me accurately and then to connect to Foursquare, which seems to be having troubles of its own lately. And then the sites are often slightly different in naming conventions for the places listed on them. Not to mention the fact that Foursquare lets users add venues. I waste a lot of time getting all this stuff to work properly, and I have come to the conclusion that it's not worth the time I've invested. Remember, I'm a geek-to-human translator, not a pure geek, so I have different requirements for tech products and services.  Among other things, I would like them to be useful, as well as merely cool. And I'd like them to work dependably.

Here are my conclusions so far:

Most of the time, I am not looking for friends when I check in, so I probably shouldn't bother. After all, when I'm at Charlie's Nails, I don't really think anyone is going to join me. They probably won't join me at the dentist, either.

If I am looking for friends, or want to be found, geo-location is not enough of an improvement over Twitter to make it truly useful. What was wrong with "I'm at Houston's. Come meet me for a drink?"

My mayorships (of Starbucks, of my gym, even of Houston's), haven't gained me anything, since the brands haven't come on board yet. By the time they do, I will have been ousted from most mayorships by those bike messengers who are paid to run around town.

So geo-location remains, for me, a form of casual gaming. Nothing more. Prove me wrong. Where is the REAL value proposition?