The following is a guest post by Mike Schneider, Senior Vice President, Director Digital Incubator at Allen & Gerritsen. Mike is also the Co-author of Location Based Marketing For Dummies – available for pre-order.

In the time since its inception, foursquare have emerged as the tool of choice by building a game that gives points and badges, a social network that connects to larger social graphs, an exploration tool and a simple API that allows others to build things on top of it. In other words, it not only competes against the aforementioned LBS consumer tools, it is a robust platform that allows others to use that functionality in their own applications.

Location Based Services 2.0 is less concerned with getting users to check-in and more concerned with using location to promote discovery. Apps like Trover, Alfred, Sonar, LoKast and Ditto are building richer (and often niche) experiences and many are leaving the check in to foursquare.

3 LBS Examples

Bizzy tells you places to go based on your preferences and the preferences of people like you. Instead of checking in, users evaluate the experience of a venue on their way out the door with one of 3 smiley faces. This puts them in a better position to talk about the experience. Bizzy uses the foursquare places database.

Forecast is an independent enhancement to foursquare that tells your friends where you will go instead of telling them where you are when you arrive. It’s a day planning tool that attempts to manufacture serendipity by notifying people where their friends will be before they go there. Forecast notifies the user at the scheduled time, asking them if they are where they thought they would be. They can then check in on foursquare with one click.

Instagram is a tool that allows users to take and edit pictures using their mobile phone. Using the foursquare place database, users can geo-tag their pictures to a place. This helps users discover experiences based on photos instead of text. In other words it’s a photo based discovery tool. Instagram also has its own API so that you can extract the images and put them into your own experience.

Taking The Plunge

Use of the foursquare API is free (see the terms of service.) For more examples of applications built on top of foursquare see the foursquare apps gallery: To get started building your own application, see the beautifully documented API.