As geo social networks gain some traction, we are beginning to see novel forms of marketing and advertisements triggered by people’s location.  On Foursquare, for instance, you can get a discount if you check into a restaurant or even get a free meal if you become the mayor. GowallaIncase messenger bags, computer backpacks, and iPhone sleeves. Collect all the badges and you get a chance to win a real Incase product.

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One of the most compelling aspects of the location-based service Foursquare is that they are increasingly enticing users to check-in to venues by partnering up to offer special deals to those who do. A person who checks-in at a coffee shop and shows the barista, may get a free coffee, for example. It’s a win-win for both the service and the venue because it gets people using the app more and gets people visiting the venue more. But what if users and venues go around Foursquare and start using Twitter for that?

That has started to happen recently, as venues are getting wise to the idea of using these special deals. For example, Patxi’s Pizza, a Bay Area-based restaurant, recently announced that it would offer a special deal to anyone who simply tweeted that they were at the restaurant, and showed their server the tweet. To be clear, they also have the same deal in place if you check-in on Foursquare, but using Twitter in a way similar to Foursquare is interesting.

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Back in November, at our Realtime CrunchUp event, I sat on the geolocation panel with members of Twitter, Foursquare, SimpleGeo, GeoAPI, Hot Potato, and Google. At one point, I raised the question if location was going to be the next battleground between startups large and small, much like social identity plays (Facebook Connect vs. Google Friend Connect) and status updates (Twitter vs. Facebook). All of the panelists indicated that it wouldn’t be, because they could all get along. How sweet. Sadly, I don’t believe them. I believe they might think that right now, because it’s still very early in the game. But it’s still a game, and people are going to play to win.

I’m sure some of them would counter that because location data is fairly standard right now, and moving easily between services, all of them will win. But that’s not true either. While location, as a whole, will win, there will be individual companies that end up ahead of others in the space. More to the point, there will be one or two services that people will go to for their social location data. That’s what we’re moving towards. And the bigger companies are starting to realize it. That’s why today we saw what may be the first maneuver in an upcoming rush to secure the location landscape, with Twitter snatching up Mixer Labs, the team behind GeoAPI.

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There’s an absolute eruption of activity around location-based services right now. Companies are getting funded left and right, new ones are popping up daily, and certain ones are seemingly starting to take off. But for a number of them, there’s a very big wall looming. And the more popular they get, the quicker they’ll reach it.

A few weeks ago, our own Jason Kincaid wrote a post about how Facebook is poised to take over the geolocation space. In it, he makes a number of good points, but there’s one that’s particularly interesting to me. “At most, there are probably a few dozen people who you’d like to share your location with,” he writes. Overall, that’s likely true to a varying degree depending on who you are, but it points to a larger problem I’m starting to notice with these location services: The more people you follow on them, the less useful the service is. This is location’s social paradox.

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If the $8.4 million raised yesterday by geo-social network Gowalla tells us anything it is that geo is red hot right right now. The trickle of geo apps is already turning into a flood. The latest example is Mobcast, an iPhone app (iTunes link) which adds lets you broadcast your location to your existing Facebook friends.

Mobcast is like a combination of Foursquare and Google Latitude. Except you use your Facebook ID to sign in and there are no check-ins. You simply select which friends you want to “mobcast” to, and then they see your updates on a map. Why join a new geo-social network when you can just tap into Facebook?

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A lot has been made recently about the gaming elements of location-based social networks. Services like Foursquare and Gowalla allow users to compete for things like mayorships, badges, and virtual goods. Now Loopt is getting in on the fun, and taking it more literally into the real world.

The Loopt Holiday Scavenger Crawl is exactly what it sounds like: It’s a scavenger hunt during the holidays. But it’s also a bit more. As everyone knows, the holidays for many are also about a fair amount of drinking, so Loopt is mixing a pub crawl into the mix as well. The plan is to have this take place in three different cities: Los Angeles, New York, and San Francisco at various dates in December and early January.

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If you’re going to leave your job at TechCrunch, you better have a good reason. I think Mark Hendrickson actually may have had one.

Hendrickson left TechCrunch is March. After about two years of writing and doing development for TC, he got the startup itch. He formed a company, Worldly Developments, and along with co-founder Jay Marcyes is now ready to unveil their project: Plancast.

As you can derive from the name, Plancast is a way to easily broadcast your plans to your online social circle. But a better way to think about it may be as a “Foursquare for the future,” which is how Hendrickson often describes it. The main idea is that while many people use Foursquare and similar location-based services like Gowalla and Loopt to share where they are, Plancast is about sharing where they will be.

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Up until now, if you wanted to use the location-based service Gowalla on the go, you had to have an iPhone. Today, that expands to Android. But rather than building an app, Gowalla has extended support to Android using the mobile web. This works because Android’s browser is closely tied to the device and is able to access location information, which is vital for Gowalla. The goal is to extend this mobile web support to BlackBerry and a few other location-aware devices in the next week or so, co-founder Josh Williams tells us.

As a small team, Gowalla, like its rival Foursquare, doesn’t have a lot of resources to devote to building apps on all the mobile platforms, so this is a good solution for the time being. Eventually, the plan is to have native apps for all the big platforms, Williams says.

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Foursquare is the location-based iPhone app getting a lot of love in the press (and from VCs) these days. And while there is no shortage of location social networking apps in the App Store, Foursquare works well on the platform because it’s based on the active checking-in to venues, which is perfect since the iPhone doesn’t allow apps to run in the background (though Loopt has a workaround). While Brightkite has also long been in this space, it’s been a while since any new viable competitors have come along. But we recently got two more: Gowalla and Going.

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