Gowalla hasn't given me enough of a reason to keep coming back other than to tell my friends where I am. And I'm not convinced thats valuable until all my frien

Gowalla hasn't given me enough of a reason to keep coming back other than to tell my friends where I am. And I'm not convinced thats valuable until all my friends are on it, to which we'll require a Loopt infrastructure + Facebook user dealio. Foursquare currently only works in specific cities, but I think its shallow in terms of why I'd keep coming back aside for the very shallow game of it. Is there value here? In the future if I get rewarded for being a mayor, and services get rewarded for active users visiting (eg: coupons) maybe. I think in the short time Gowalla and Foursquare will duke it out, I'm skeptical that they'll get enough users without teaming up with a big player. Facebook has 300M web users. Loopt has 3M mobile users. Gowalla has 50k? The other problem with these applications is the lack of background apps. Why do I have to manually check in to every place I go, why can't it work like Google Lattitude on my Blackberry: it just runs and does everything for me. A Last.FM scrobbler for location, please. (Fire-eagle?) Flook is interesting, but entirely disconnected from Gowalla and Foursquare. A better comparison for Flook is MobileSafari, or TwitPic, or Flickr. Flook is about content thats around me thats cool - who created it comes second to this. I guess there is also the element of where are my friends going that is interesting, but I believe that is secondary to the value of being somewhere and having interesting local hidden gems. And we all know the challenges with this kind of "information overload vs filter failure" plays, the devil is in the details.