SXSW's location-tagging smackdown - Fortune Brainstorm Tech 20100314 00:38

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Foursquare and Gowalla are squaring off for the title of top tagger at Austin's annual tech-fest. ... These services help you not only locate where your friends and contacts are at any given moment — perfect for a conference of networking-enthusiasts who all want to connect with the people they know, and the people they only know virtually and want to meet in real life.

Plus, each service offers a competition element. In Foursquare, for example, people can be noteworthy and attain badges within the system for doing such things as being the biggest regular at a certain place (What Norm and Cliff from "Cheers" would do with this…) and going to a venue in which a lot of Foursquare members of the opposite sex are present.

Gowalla lets you do such things as get virtual goods, and recognition, when you check in at a particular location, as well as when you reach particular milestones. (Think completing a pub crawl.) ... http://brainstormtech.blogs.fortune.cnn.com/2010/03/12/sxsws-location-tagging-smackdown/

Foursquare is a location-based social networking website, software for mobile devices, and game. Users "check-in" at venues using text messaging or a device specific application.[1] They are then awarded points and sometimes "badges." The service was created by Dennis Crowley and Naveen Selvadurai; Crowley had previously founded the similar project Dodgeball, which Google bought in 2005 and shut down in 2009. As of early 2010, the website has about 450,000 members. ... http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foursquare_(service)

Gowalla is a location-based social networking game created by Alamofire. At the start of December 2009 it was reported that Gowalla had raised $8.4 million in a round of venture capital funding led by Greylock Partners. ... http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gowalla