By offering badges, mayorships, and other intangible rewards, millions of people are checking in to the places they go. The next step is for these apps to add greater purpose by encouraging more meaningful checkins and offering corresponding badges and stamps, thus mapping the cause universe. Tags: Social Media android applications blasterous blockchalk BP causeworld dehood foursquare geolocation googlemaps gowalla greenopia iphone layar LBS locavore mapquest momentfeed neighborgoods oilreporter oilspill stickybits trapster waze This post was written by Rob Reed. MORE >>

By offering badges, mayorships, and other intangible rewards, millions of people are checking in to the places they go. The next step is for these apps to add greater purpose by encouraging more meaningful checkins and offering corresponding badges and stamps, thus mapping the cause universe. Tags: Social Media android applications blasterous blockchalk BP causeworld dehood foursquare geolocation googlemaps gowalla greenopia iphone layar LBS locavore mapquest momentfeed neighborgoods oilreporter oilspill stickybits trapster waze This post was written by Rob Reed. Digg this! MORE >>

Aisle411, which recently released its service as an iPhone app ( free from the iPhone App Store ), helps shoppers find what they are looking for in the store (down to the specific section of aisle) and get rewarded for it. Reviews: Once people find what they’re after, they can scan the barcode (iPhone app only) and get product reviews served up from Amazon.com. It has an iPhone app out now and plans for BlackBerry and Android apps in the pipeline. But we have found that no one is offering rewards and badges for interacting inside the app. Smart move. MORE >>

And Yelp is an interesting player in this market, boasting a huge user base (huge by Foursquare standards) that it brought into the location-based world with an iPhone app earlier this year. The The Yelp iPhone app alone had around 1.25 guess Facebook could clone Foursquare’s badges and point system, but then it would be Foursquare screen scraped into Facebook. I couldn’t find current stats on Yelp’s iPhone app user base, hence the discombobulated comparison. don’t think so. Experts ” have recently placed Foursquare valuations in the $50M to $70M range. MORE >>

As one middle-aged woman pointed out, she wasn’t going to use Foursquare on her iPhone because none of her friends were on it. iPhone Apps for the Introverted Socialite. The Dangers of Foursquare Badge Fatigue. With Facebook’s recent roll-out of Places , many have posited the beginning of the end for what had been everyone’s LBS darling, Foursquare. After all, Facebook’s built-in user base of over 500 million people they could dwarf Foursquare’s user base of about 3 million with even a modest rate of adoption (about.6%.). But would she use Facebook places? Of course! MORE >>