Gowalla

• The user interface is beautifully designed
• Works like geo-caching, except you’re discovering and dropping virtual items
• Using my 3GS iPhone, it pin points my location using GPS, so I don’t need to know the actual address
• Has a “Trips” feature where you can create or join trips that have been made in your city. For example a pub crawl or historic walk.

Foursquare

• It’s been around longer, so more people are using it which makes it more fun
• The Tips section is fantastic. Just the other night I enjoyed some terrific butternut squash soup at Firefly Grille.
• Today I was offered free gnocchi from the Red Pony in Franklin, TN. (pictured here) —>

Brightkite

• Has been around way longer than the others, but doesn’t have the “play” aspect as the other two.
• Use your RSS feed from Brightkite and embed it in Google Maps for a fun, interactive map.

What are you using?

Which do you prefer and why?

Basically, you install Dodgeball on your mobile phone. You add friends to your Dodgeball account (similar to adding followers on Twitter) and they add you. Now, let’s say I’m sitting in a coffee shop (or more likely a pub) and I change my status to available. When a friend is in a certain proximity to the pub (err, coffee shop) they get an alert that tells them where I am. They see I’m available and decide to pop in to join me. Cool, eh?

I predicted that SXSW Interactive 2008 would be the make or break event for Twitter. If Twitter went down during such an important conference the users would simply pick up and move on to the next best option. Twitter was basically born at that event, so it was likely it could have been killed there too. I’m glad it wasn’t.

Imagine how excited I was when I heard that the power of Dodgeball is back. Here’s the nitty gritty:

Fire Eagle lets you share your location with sites and services online and promises to make the whole web respond to your location.

UpComing is a free events calendar service similar to MeetUp.

Twitter is a microblogging service which allows you to send instant messages to the masses (but if you know me you probably already knew this right?)

Now take all three and add the functionality of SMS and you have… Fireball. Note that UpComing and Fire Eagle are both owned by Yahoo. Why hasn’t Google stepped to the plate since they own, well, everything else?

Read more about Fireball and keep your eyes out for this one. You know I’ll have it installed on my iPhone (yes, I finally bought one – thanks Heather).