There’s plenty of prior evidence that design can come late to a company and still succeed, of course; there’s less evidence that design can come late to a platform and still win over that platform’s whole ecosystem.

ActionBarSherlock is an extension of the compatibility library designed to facilitate the use of the action bar design pattern across all versions of Android with a single API.

On October 27th, Nintendo published half year results for the fiscal year ending in March 2012. Management stated that the company lost over $900 million with a negative outlook. Nintendo cited weaker than expected sales of Nintendo DS hardware and 3DS software and Yen appreciation as the main reasons for the miss. Is this the end of Nintendo?

Code signing can be a pain, but the fact that Xcode gives very little information about a mobile provisioning file does not ease things. Let me introduce a new QuickLook plugin. This plugin allows you to get a QuickLook preview for all .mobileprovision files.

Skeleton is a small collection of CSS & JS files that can help you rapidly develop sites that look beautiful at any size, be it a 17" laptop screen or an iPhone. Skeleton is built on three core principles

‘320 and Up’ prevents mobile devices from downloading desktop assets by using a tiny screen’s stylesheet as its starting point. Try this page at different window sizes and on different devices to see it in action.

No code changes need. Just build your app for the Simulator (rather than the Device), and upload your .app to us. We give you back a link to your app on the web.

Zepto.js is a minimalist JavaScript framework for mobile WebKit browsers, with a jQuery-compatible syntax.

This section contains my official mobile pages. They treat various aspects of mobile web development.

In this article, we will show you the building blocks required to incorporate fixed position into your own mobile web applications.

A Web form which works well on desktops won’t necessarily work on mobile devices. With the nature of desktop computers, Web forms are not designed to be efficient. Due to the constraints of a mobile device and its context of use, efficiency is extremely important when filling in a mobile form. This article offers strategies that you can apply to design a more efficient and less error prone mobile form as compared to your Web form.

A collection of all things mobile web, from statistics, to design patterns to documentation.

WordPress is incredibly popular, so it’s no surprise that there are a few iOS apps out there written either specifically for WordPress or to at least integrate with WordPress.

WordPress for iOS – Of course, you have to start off the list with this app, the official WordPress app from Automattic. “With WordPress for iOS, you can moderate comments, create or edit posts and pages, and add images or videos with ease.” Requires a self-hosted WordPress or WordPress.com blog. (iTunes)
Express for WordPress – “Express is an iPhone app built to quickly and effortlessly publish images/links/notes and short posts, on the go, to your WooThemes powered WordPress website.” Requires either a tumblog theme from WooThemes or the WooTumblog plugin. (iTunes)
PhotoSmash – “PhotoSmash makes sharing images on your WordPress blog a snap! Don’t wait until you get back home to post your images.” Requires the PhotoSmash Galleries plugin. (iTunes)
Polldaddy – “Take the pulse of your customers directly for the first time ever with Polldaddy for iOS. Now all the power and flexibility of Polldaddy surveys are literally at your fingertips.” Requires a Polldaddy account and the Polldaddy Polls and Ratings plugin for WordPress interoperability. (iTunes)
ShoZu – “ShoZu connects you with all your favorite social networks from one app. Update all of your social networks at once – upload photos and videos to over 50 of your favorite sites including Flickr, Facebook, Twitter, Blogger, Photobucket, WordPress, MySpace, Photoshop, and email addresses at the same time.” Requires a ShoZu account. (iTunes)
WordPress Mobile Statistics – “WP Mobile statistics gives you the opportunity to check the information available from the WordPress.com Stats plugin from your iPhone/iPad or iPod Touch.” Requires the WordPress.com Stats plugin or a WordPress.com blog. (iTunes)
WP Dump – “WP-Dump is a simple and fast photo app for WordPress blog users to upload photos directly into their blog.” Requires the i-Dump iPhone Photo Uploader plugin. (iTunes)

Do you use an iOS app with WordPress that we’ve neglected to list? If so, we’d love to hear about it!

We keep mentioning that the iPad is catching on in the enterprise, but where is it being used? According to a report released today by device management vendor Good Technology, financial service firms are the enterprises most likely to adopt the iPad,. Good collected usage data from its install base and found that 36.8% of its customers' iPad deployments are in financial services companies. Other popular verticals are technology (11.4%) and healthcare (10.5%).

Sponsor

We mentioned financial advisors as one of Gartner's examples of professions that could make use of the iPad's form factor in our article on why enterprise IT should support the iPad. Other examples included architects, realtors and sales people. The form factor may make it easier for professionals to share information in small meetings where a projector isn't necessary and a laptop seems cumbersome.

Good previously released data showing meteoric growth in the enterprise of both iOS and Android devices. The company offers a solution that gives BlackBerry Enterprise Server style control over multiple mobile platforms - including iOS, Android and Palm. We also compared some of Good's device usage data with other usage surveys here.

Along with the report, the company announced a new version of its Good for Enterprise application is now available in the App Store.

Discuss

In December of 2009 mobile device management vendor Good Technology began supporting iPhones and Android devices. Since then the companies says 1,500 enterprises have deployed iPhones and Android devices using Good for Enterprise, around 43% of Good's overall deployments. Good has described the monthly growth of both platforms as "meteoric." For instance, the iPhone 4 was the fourth most popular phone among Good users by the end of June - and it didn't even come out until June 24. By the end of July it was Good's most popular device.

Sponsor

Employee owned devices are driving the majority of the growth. More and more employees are bringing personal smart phones to work and asking IT to support them.

According Dimitri Volkmann, Good's VP of Product Management, the company isn't seeing many companies dropping support for BlackBerrys or Windows Mobile phones, but it is seeing a lot more companies supporting multiple devices. Nearly 1/5 of its enterprise customers are now supporting at least three platforms.

Of course, supporting multiple platforms is Good's core business - BlackBerry-only shops won't be seeking out Good's products. But Good's customers represent many industries - including healthcare, retail, financial and government - so it gives us an interesting glimpse of some of the changes in going on in the enterprise. As we've mentioned before, Intel (a Good customer) now supports more user owned devices (mostly iPhones) than company owned BlackBerrys.

Good provided us a top ten list of devices activated with Good Enterprise in July:

1. Apple iPhone 4
2. Apple iPhone 3GS
3. Apple iPhone 3G
4. Motorola Droid
5. Apple iPad
6. Motorola Droid X
7. HTC Droid Incredible
8. HTC Evo 4G
9. HTC Cedar
10. Samsung I637

Update: To clarify, this list only includes devices Good supports. No BlackBerry device ranked because Good does not support BlackBerry.

Good for Enterprise enables IT managers to manage multiple mobile platforms from a single system. It provides enterprise-level security and compliance for iOS, Android, WebOS and other platforms.

Good was founded in 1996. Motorola bought the company in 2006 and then sold it to Visto in 2009. Visto promptly changed its name to Good after the acquisition, effectively merging the two companies. Good claims forty of the Forture 100 are Good customers. Other Good clients include DARPA, Geico and Starbucks.

Discuss

Today CNET reports that the European Commission has selected iPhones and HTC phones over BlackBerrys, striking another blow to Reasearch in Motion. This follows Saudi Arabia announcing it will ban BlackBerry service starting Friday. The United Arab Emirates and other countries are threatening to ban BlackBerry services as well.

The EC cited a few criteria for its selection, but this stands out: "openness toward other applications and future technologies."

Sponsor

Following the announcement of the BlackBerry Torch yesterday, we wrote that the BlackBerry felt like yesterday's smartphone compared to other devices on the market. Some thought-out emphasis on bleeding-edge technological features like augmented reality and video conferencing was unfair to RIM, which is focused on fulfilling today's business users' needs.

To be fair, RIM still rules the roost in a few areas: security, email and SMS, and battery life (battery life concerns may be why RIM opted for a less impressive screen for the Torch). For many enterprises, this is a perfect combination of features and will continue to be for some time now. The truth is that most users seem to be perfectly happy with the iPhone and Android's messaging features. iOS and Android already meet the security requirements of most enterprises, and third-party solutions can help make up for other security issues. Android users seem complain the most about battery life, but iPhone users seem satisfied.

Meanwhile, despite having a huge head start on Apple and Google, both dwarf BlackBerry when it comes to the number of apps available. RIM doesn't seem to be winning on quality of apps either. The reality is that developers are making BlackBerry a low priority. Does this matter for the enterprise? Yes. Enterprises' communication and collaboration is quickly moving beyond just email. Web applications - whether on-premise or in the cloud - are becoming increasingly common and mission-critical. Enterprise users are going to increasingly depend on mobile phones to access critical company data, and having native apps to do so will be a strong selling point.

RIM is finally releasing a web browser which may be able to compete with the browsers offered by Apple, Google and Palm. But OS6 isn't even out yet, and when it comes out it only catches RIM up to where others have been for years. Enterprises don't want to invest in technology that will be obsolete in the next quarter; they want technology they can count on to be ready for whatever needs they have two or three years down the road.

And that's not even taking into consideration the pressures IT managers are feeling from employees at all levels to support so-called "consumer" devices, regardless of any technological or business advantages they may have.

It may ultimately be in RIM's best interest to keep its focus on its core competencies of security, messaging and battery life in order to keep the segment of users who place the biggest priority on these features. It may not be able to do much encourage developers to develop for its platform, but as enterprise priorities shift and RIM's competitors improve in those key areas, RIM is going to need to do some serious innovating if it wants to stay relevant to the enterprise at large.

Discuss

When will we see the battle of the location-based services really come to a head? Will it be when Facebook finally comes out with its much anticipated entry into the LBS market? Or will it happen with Foursquare inking deals with major search engines? Perhaps it will happen when GPS technology becomes nearly ubiquitous among cell phone owners - a time that may be nearer than you think.

A release by analyst firm iSuppli says that four out of five cell phones will integrate GPS technology by the end of 2011, with the adoption of smartphones leading the march.

Sponsor

In the first quarter of 2009, 56% of phones incorporated GPS, meaning just under 200 million phones. By the end of 2011, iSuppli predicts that this number will increase to nearly 320 million GPS-enabled phones, coming in at just a hair under 80% of all cell phones.

As a result of this massive adoption of GPS-enabled phones, iSuppli also predicts the slow death of "Portable Navigation Devices", with smartphones exceeding PNDs in that realm by 2014. On this point, we would venture that we wouldn't be surprised if this happened sooner than that, even.

Dr. Jagdish Rebello, a principal analyst for iSuppli quoted in the release, says that "social networking services and applications spurred by GPS-related features are critical elements in the smart phone market today."

"This is illustrated by Google Inc.'s decision to make turn-by-turn navigation, LBS and mobile ads the central features in its bid to take on Apple in the smart phone market, and make up the central pillars of its strategy to increasingly monetize mobile search," Rebello says in the release.

Beyond smartphones, iSuppli also predicts that 18% of laptops and 42% of portable handheld video games will have integrated GPS by 2014.

Discuss

Gorgeous, image-rich magazines with long-form content, published periodically. Sometimes it feels like that's what the iPad was made for. On its second birthday from inside HP Labs, the do-it-yourself magazine publishing service MagCloud is launching a new feature that lets any magazine on the platform become iPad optimized with a single click. I'm really excited about this. It's not the Wired iPad app, yet. But it is a whole world of other magazines.

Hacker Monthly: The Print Magazine of Hacker News on the iPad? Zip! Art Nouveau Magazine on the iPad? Bang! Mowmentum: The Magazine for the Lawnmower Racing Community...on the iPad? Boom.

Sponsor

Above: The magazine rack. Below: Scrubbing through the pages.

In addition to iPad availability, the print on demand part of MagCloud is growing more sophisticated as well. Publishers can now choose to put a spine on their magazines (which should be a big improvement), the page limit has been raised to 384 pages and, perhaps most importantly, HP will now ship printed magazines anywhere in the world.

But it's the iPad publishing and reading that interests me most. Publishers can opt-in to allowing readers to click on a link to download a magazine to the Magcloud iPad app.

This is especially if price points can settle into something reasonable. I told HP's Andrew Bolwell that what I really wanted were magazines priced like iPhone apps. Give me really good $2 magazines and I'll buy them all day long. A $10 magazine on the iPad? Probably not. "I personally believe that the same is true for content," he told me. "I hope the market will come to a point where content on the iPad is priced below the threshold of consideration on price."

Right now MagCloud supports simple PDF uploads, but the future is wide open, Bolwell says. Possibilities include multimedia, DRM-free publishing (there's DRM today) and an HP-powered ad network.

"We want to offer the option for people to do anything they want in the digital space," Bolwell says.

Discuss

MasterCard recently launched a new mobile application called "MasterCard Marketplace Overwhelming Offers," which delivers daily deals to iPhone users. Despite its mouthful of a name, savvy shoppers planning on purchasing a big-ticket item in the near future may want to keep an eye on this one.

Like the popular Internet retailer Woot (just bought by Amazon), the app provides deeply discounted items, available in limited quantities for a limited time. At 12 p.m. Eastern (GMT - 4:00) every day, a new deal is posted to the mobile app, offering "door-buster" type savings of 50% or more on brand-name products from a network of over 28,000 merchants.

Sponsor

The offers are made available thanks to MasterCard's partnership with e-commerce company Next Jump, which already powers the desktop version of the MasterCard Marketplace website, launched in April.

Some of the past "OO's" (overwhelming offers), as they're called, have included deals like $100 off flights booked via Priceline.com, $50 off anything at TigerDirect.com, $25 off Target merchandise, $100 off Wal-Mart merchandise, $75 off the Barnes & Noble eBook Reader, $50 off digital cameras at Staples, $100 off a Nintendo Wii from Kmart and much more.

How to Play... err... Shop

There's a game-like element to scoring these deals, too. They launch at a given time and sell out fast - sometimes even in seconds, so you have to be quick to win the chance to purchase these items. To get a heads up about what deal is launching when, shoppers can sign up for email alerts that are sent out several hours prior to the OO start time and detail pricing, quantities available and other descriptive info about the product.

And if you're worried that you still might find a better deal by shopping around online, the app has you covered here, too. Instead of purchasing the item immediately from your mobile, you simply "reserve" the item. Of course, to do so, you have to link a MasterCard credit, debit or prepaid card to your account first. You then have up to three days to redeem your reservation.

One important item to note, and a big difference between Woot and this app, is that the discounts you receive are not immediate. Instead, they're provided to you as rebates posted to your MasterCard account. You will actually have to buy the item at full price then wait, usually around two weeks, before the credit is posted. At most, according to the FAQ, this process may take up to 21 days.

MasterCard and M-Commerce

MasterCard seems intent on tapping into the growing m-commerce trend, potentially a $2.2 billion dollar industry by the end of this year according to ABI Research. The Marketplace app is just one of many the company has launched for the device in recent months. It also has MoneySend, a person-to-person mobile payments application, Easy Savings Program, an app that locates nearby discounts from participating merchants, Priceless Picks, an app that lets shoppers share great deals with each other anywhere around the world and an ATM finder application. Unfortunately for Android users, the only app MasterCard has ported to that platform is its one-off app, "Flavours of Shanghai 2010," designed specifically for EXPO 2010.

Discuss

Facebook's new head of mobile products, Eric Tseng, spoke today at MobileBeat 2010, introducing a new approach to the company's OpenGraph.

"Where we're going from here is a platform strategy. We're going away from a one-off app strategy,"

In other words, OpenGraph's going mobile, in more ways than one.

Sponsor

Goin' Mobile

First, Facebook considers and will approach further development of OpenGraph as a platform with infinite reach. Second, you'll soon see OpenGraph elements, like the Like button, growing out through unconnected mobile apps, as they already have through the non-mobile space. Facebook, after all, counts its mobile users at 150 million.

The "'Like' button for the entire Web" has now become the Like button for the post-Web world. Whether that is a good thing is highly debatable. That it is in fact a reality is not.

Social Intelligence

One of the examples Tseng gave, according to CNET, was of a location-aware coupon program that would gather feedback from friends and acquaintances. (Though if the current state of that technology is any indication, this example may remain just that for a while.)

The melding of app and social is happening apace. If Facebook's intuition is right, it will continue, especially in the area of marketing and commerce. Tseng was quoted on VentureBeat.

"If you can actually layer on top of [location] some kind of social intelligence -- not just the fact that I'm near Starbucks, but the fact that 30 of my friends really like this frappuccino over the last couple months -- I've got an interesting use case."

For a certain value of "interesting" anyway. Not necessarily thrilling, but maybe profitable.

Discuss

Imagine if Tom Paine, or Benjamin Franklin, or Emma Goldman had the power to cast their passing thoughts, while walking down the street, to thousands or millions of people all around the world, with ease, in minutes. They would expel the building material of a mason, wouldn't they?

That power is now in all of our hands, thanks to a new class of mobile applications that's maturing very quickly. Mobile podcasting apps are now powerful, easy to use, free and tied to big social networks for distribution. The latest to hit the scene is Cinch, from BlogTalk Radio, which landed in the Android marketplace this morning after several months on the iPhone.

Sponsor

Cinch is a relatively simple app, and it has its technical issues on occasion, but it's absolutely revolutionary and so far could be the best in its class. Users launch the app, hit record, speak into their phone, press stop, give their recording a title, aim it at their Twitter or Facebook friends, and then hit publish. Within minutes the recording is uploaded to the Cinch servers and a link to listen is pushed out to the designated social networks.

I've been using Cinch on the iPhone for months now, to record my thoughts about art and the internet, about writing, or the soundscape from the train station in my home town. I marvel, every time, at the fact that I can publish my thoughts so effortlessly in audio out to the world now, from wherever I am. Just like blogging made text publishing and distribution more accessible and democratic than it had ever been before in human history, mobile audio publishing apps like this are truly world changing. The availability of Cinch on Android is an important event.

Cinch isn't the only mobile podcasting app available for today's smartphones. AudioBoo is another one that you might enjoy on the iPhone. It's far more attractive visually, has more features, more users and appears to have fewer bugs. It has a 5 minute time limit on audio recording, though. That's very inconvenient, as the timer is usually out of sight up against my ear. I also regularly have 6 or 7 minute long thoughts. I haven't hit the time limit on Cinch yet.

Social media apps come and social media apps go, more launch every day than anyone can keep track of, but some of them are worth taking pause and considering the implications of. The power of instant, mobile, global audio publishing in your pocket, for free? That really means something.

Discuss

Imagine a Web-based bank that lets you deposit checks by simply photographing them with its mobile app. It lets you make cash withdrawals from ATMs all over the country at no cost, sometimes even reimbursing you for fees you get charged by other companies. As a social Web application, the bank offers you all kinds of recommendations and value-added services based on analyzing your private data.

Does that sound crazy? Perhaps no more crazy than an empty box labeled "What are you doing?" sounded three years ago when software developer Alex Payne joined Twitter as its API lead, the position responsible for helping birth the famous ecosystem of outside developers building apps on top of Twitter. Today Payne announced that he's leaving Twitter to co-found an online banking startup with just such a vision, called BankSimple. BankSimple plans to launch to the public later this year; its website is currently down due to overwhelming interest after Payne's announcement.

Sponsor

Financial Industry Disruption

After Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey shifted his focus to Square, Payne becomes at least the second micro-messaging forefather to shift gears into the financial tech market.

BankSimple says it will be "an easy, intuitive, and social bank for people who appreciate simple online services." The company emphasizes its lack of fees, saying that other banks grew greedy when they moved beyond making money from interest on deposits.

The company says it will offer a mobile application to deposit checks by uploading a photo. Such practices are likely to become more common in the future - but they still feel very futuristic. (Readers have pointed out that the United Services Automobile Association's bank does this already.) Intuit is developing software to prepare simple tax filings by mobile photo upload, for example. Banking and personal finance are sectors expected to see major disruption in coming years, thanks largely to developments on the Internet.

Analyst firm Gartner said last month that traditional online banking faces a serious challenge from a new class of service providers focused on more advanced financial operations than mere transactions. "Most bank offerings have limited forecasting and analytical tools and don't cleanly support multiple bank relationships," Gartner's Douglas McKibben wrote. Traditional banks need "a wake-up call," McKibben wrote, "regarding the need for responsive, personalized customer applications." "In the longer term, the concept of a proprietary online commercial banking platform will be obsolete," McKibben wrote in a report with Stessa Cohen, "and banks will only orchestrate and not control access to services and information."

Those conditions appear to be exactly where BankSimple is aimed.

Payne says the other BankSimple founders live in New York, but that he will remain in Portland, Oregon, where he is currently relocating to. In addition to co-founding the company, he will be its Chief Product & Technology Officer. "In a nutshell," he wrote on his personal blog, "I'm going to make sure we build something that's simple, beautiful, and works really really well."

Payne's co-founders include Josh Reich, who previously worked on the very-heady Web-user-data futures-market startup Root Markets, led by serial entrepreuer Seth Goldstein. Goldstein once said Reich had a "beautiful mind." Reich and Payne are joined by Shamir Karkal, an MBA most recently at McKinsey.

Photo by Dave Fayram.

Discuss

As many in the Twitterverse have dubbed this week, the battle of location based apps continues, as both Gowalla and Foursquare release yet another update to their iPhone apps today. And these are some big guns coming out to accompany the various real-life incentives, contests and whatever else these the two companies can do to take the focus at this year's SXSW.

Both apps are showcasing new design features the companies are calling "fresh" and other such things, and while they surely are, some of these other features are what really stand out.

Sponsor

Foursquare is surely the less notable in this release, in our opinion, as it's list of new features is shorter and less impressive. It's boasting a faster, more efficient check-in and shout flow, a "Places" view that supports categories, a history view of places you've been and a "pull-to-refresh" feature. These are nothing to sneeze at, but we think Gowalla is releasing some functions that blow these away.

First of all, Gowalla is bringing photos to the location based game, allowing users to upload a photo after checking in. Users can also browse their friends' photos and look at any that have been taken at that specific location.

Next, it's bringing some interactivity to the game, with check-in commenting. When a friend checks in at a place down the street, you don't need to change over to your Twitter client and send them a DM, you can just comment on their check-in. And if you forgot to type a check-in message when you checked in to a spot, you can go back and add it.

In addition to these, Gowalla is bringing out new friend browsing features, enabling you to look through friends, friends of friends, and even their bookmarked spots and trips. With "spot details", including address, phone, Twitter name, Facebook page and website, Gowalla is adding that Yelp (or should I say Foursquare) aspect that was really missing - real world connection information.

And one more feature that may be overloaded next week or may be the talk of the town, "Hot Spots", tells you what the most popular spots near your location are. We haven't had time to really play with it yet, but it sure sounds interesting.

The updates just popped up in the App Store right now so go get updated and let us know what you think - who is going to win the location based battle of SXSW 2010? As far as this round goes, we're calling it for Gowalla.

Discuss

Location-based social networks like Foursquare, Gowalla, Brightkite and Google Buzz are currently among the fastest growing new mobile services. All of these apps have one thing in common: they encourage you to share your current location with the rest of the world. By doing this, though, you are also telling people where you are not: at home. A new site, PleaseRobMe, plays on this theme and displays real-time updates from Foursquare users who broadcast their check-ins on Twitter.

Sponsor

According to the trio of developers behind the site (Barry Borsboom, Frank Groeneveld and Boy van Amstel), "the goal of this website is to raise some awareness of this issue and have people think about how they use services like Foursquare, Brightkite, Google Buzz etc." There are also ads on the site, so the developers clearly also had something else in mind when they started this site. No matter the developers' motivations, the visceral reaction to PleaseRobeMe on Twitter, shows that the developers have hit a nerve.

PleaseRobMe doesn't show anything new that a regular Twitter search for the 4sq.com domain wouldn't uncover, but it's the first time that a service has made this information so blatantly obvious. We don't think that a lot of thieves are actually trolling the Internet for information when people leave their homes, though we have already seen some burglaries where status updates may have played a role.

Besides robberies, there are also other reasons why you might want to keep your Foursquare profile private. Do you, after all, really want to tell your future employer that your spent all those weeknights at the local bar?

Privacy Concerns: The Limiting Factor for Location-Based Networks?

More importantly, though, this service highlights the privacy implications of regularly broadcasting your location. Some people are willing to take the risk and are perfectly fine with broadcasting their location and services like Foursquare reward these check-ins with virtual badges and real-world discounts for their most active users. For a lot of people, however, sharing location data takes online transparency one step too far.

Ultimately, the success of location-based networks will be limited if they can't find ways to make users feel safe when using these services.

How to Stay Safe?

If you really feel the need to share your location with the whole world, then you have to accept the risks. This isn't just limited to location-aware applications, though. Posting Twitter updates from your vacation also make it pretty obvious that you are not at home.

When it comes to location-aware services and geo-social networks, we prefer services that allow their users to send location updates privately to a select group of friends and trusted contacts. BrightKite - one of the older geo-social networks - for example, allows you to set very granular privacy controls on a per-post level. Of course, you could always resort to using a completely anonymous service like BlockChalk or a permission-based one-on-one service like EchoEcho, but with these, you can't update your friends about what bar to meet them at either and the social aspects of these services are limited.

It would also be nice if these services allowed users to select the level of granularity of their check-ins. While this won't discourage burglars (and doesn't work for FourSquare-like apps), being able to just point to "Houston, TX" as your location instead of the actual hotel your are staying in could alleviate the fears of a lot of users.

The Dangers of Mixing the Virtual and the Real World

PleaseRobMe points out the dangers of location-based social networks. Services like Foursquare, Brightkite and Google Buzz bridge the gap between the virtual world of social networks and the real world, which is something we are not accustomed, to. It's easy to think that the information we share online doesn't have any influence on the real world, but PleaseRobMe makes it pretty clear that there can be real-world consequences to sharing your location.

What Do You Do?

What is your policy for staying safe on location-aware social networks? Do you avoid them at all cost? Do you think that the positive aspects outweigh the potential risks? Do you use a pseudonym and a fake avatar? Let us know in the comments.

Discuss