Beyond Foursquare: The future of geolocation apps and websites

From the early days of geolocation, with Platial kicking off the geolocation revolution in the practically prehistoric year of 2005, a number of paradigm-shifting startups have already come, gone or been sold, among them fwix, Loopt, Ditto, Blockboard, Everyblock (shut down this month) and the late lamentedNextStop and Whrrl. On last Sunday, Josh Williams, former founder and CEO of Gowalla and now a product manager at Facebook, penned a great writeup on the early years of the Foursquare-Gowalla death match, spanning 2009-2010, before Foursquare emerged as the King of Check-In Mountain. Now that the table has been set, what's next for geolocation? Is it all about Foursquare,Yelp, yawn and go home? I don't think so. Instead, we're seeing geolocation begin to splinter into niches and verticals. And, within a couple of years, geolocation capabilities will simply be baked into our everyday on-the-go lives. From Silicon Valley and elsewhere, startups have emerged with powerful, useful geolocation capabilities central to their business model. As someone who's as much an entrepreneur as a social strategist, I'm about to cast off into these choppy waters myself with a startup called Placely. (Come add your email addy to be notified when we're ready to roll!) Travel, recommendations, geo-social and more In surveying the competitive landscape, I've been struck by how diverse the geo-landscape has become. We're still in the expansion, experimentation and buyout phase -- before the inevitable contraction, consolidation and hand-wringing phase sets in. Every week, it seems, I hear about a new startup doing something interesting with geolocation. (I still wish Gowalla had pivoted instead of selling to Facebook.) Navigation apps like Waze and mapping sites (Google, Apple, Mapquest, Bing Maps) are all about location, but they're too obvious to include here. So what are the new breed of startups using location information in interesting, new ways? I could use your help in thinking about how to group these startups. Here's a first stab. Once we have our categories, I'll drill deeper with a take on what's working, not working, and where the real breakthroughs are. Here goes -- see if you can group these differently, and let us know about other notable startups we've missed that deserve to be listed here, (I'm sure there are dozens!): Place annotations and discoveries Description: With these apps, it's all about places. Document a