But then you start noticing some differences. There’s no option to find your friends, and certainly no mechanism for following them. You can interact with anyone who “drops” into your location, but you’re most likely dealing with a complete stranger. If you ask a question or make a positive or critical comment, you’re just as likely to get a response from the venue’s owner as you are from one of its patrons. And once you’ve left a location, you’ll still be able to see all of the activity going on there, but you’ll find your ability to interact with the locale much more limited.

Evzdrop CEO David Rush said he and fellow co-founder Eric Brown were inspired to start Evzdrop in 2012 because of the difficulty of sorting useful information about a bar, restaurant or event from social networks.

“There’s a fire hose of information coming out of Facebook and Twitter,” Rush said. “Check-ins are more about showing where you are to friends, which is what Foursquare has become today. … We wanted to create an app that allows you to share a common interest in place — one that lets you get the perspective of people who, along with you, are actually at an event.”

To that end, Evzdrop has created a kind of geofenced social network, allowing only people who are actually at a location to engage with one another and the business itself. Everyone else is just a voyeur. They can follow all of the drop posts going at location, but they can’t participate themselves except to comment on other people’s drops.

From my experiences fiddling with the app, many of the drops aren’t terribly useful — “Dude, this band rocks!” — but as more people use the app, more useful information rises to the top through a “props” system that allows other people at vote up the most entertaining or informative posts.

The idea, Rush said, is to create not just a repository of immediate information — older drops disappear from the site — but a real-time dialogue between all of the people sharing the same space. That differentiates it from Yelp and other reviews sites, Rush said.

If Evzdrop can reach critical mass it should be able to tell if the Hamachi at the local sushi bar is particularly fresh or foul on any particular hour. Sports bar owners will be able to alert you to which games they’re showing in playoffs, or respond to requests from customers on the premise to switch to a different game. Concert attendees can demand a band play a particular song.

Do we really need another check-in app?

Of course, to get this kind of depth out of the service, Evzdrop really needs to scale. Right now it’s still a tiny operation. It has six employees and $500,000 in angel funding, and its Android and iPhone app only has a miniscule 11,000 downloads. Growing that base is going to be difficult to say the least. Not only are there numerous competing apps promoting their own take on the check-in, every major social network, review app and location-based service — from Facebook to Yelp to Google Latitude — have added check-in capabilities. The last thing most consumers want to do is download and register an account with another check-in app.

Building a business around social-location is also proving to be a difficult even if you 3.5 billion check-ins like Foursquare. New York’s check-in pioneer just raised another $41 million in financing, but it’s under intense pressure to prove it has viable business model.

Rush said that Evzdrop hopes to gain traction by targeting business owners and event planners, getting them to promote the app to their customers. Rush thinks the app would be particularly appealing for helping track customer sentiment and complaints at big events like concerts or benefits, where organizers can communicate with a lot of people en masse.

To that end Evzdrop is making venue owners a key part of the network, rather than just peripheral participants. They don’t get control their local social networks like, say, moderators on a discussion board. But they can communicate privately with their patrons, Evzdrop provides them with real-time data about the sentiment of their clientele. Rush said Evzdrop considers itself just as much a customer relations management (CRM) platform as it does a social networking app.

That business focus is also key to its business model. While any business owner can register their place with Evzdrop, gaining access to its customer communications tools, Evzdrop hopes to build a premium platform that would allow businesses to market promotions to their most frequent customers as well as give them more control over the interaction within the walls of their social networks.

Rush said one tool Evzdrop plans to implement is a means to flag negative sentiment, allowing a proprietor to intercept a critical drop before it goes live giving them a chance to address the complaint immediately. Rush said Evzdrop would never allow businesses to censor posts — every drop would still go live – just create a kind of early warning system for negative feedback.

It seems Evzdrop is trying to walk a fine line. It’s admirable that Evzdrop is trying to develop its business model at the get go, as opposed to Twitter and Foursquare, which built their social networks and then tried to figure out how to make money. But if patrons start perceiving Evzdrop as just a promotional pulpit for businesses, they won’t use it as a social network. And if Evzdrop can’t build up a social network, it doesn’t have a business.

Concert image courtesy of Flickr user humbert15.

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The feature will go live in March, Bloomberg’s unnamed sources said, and if the report is accurate there are elements of the service that will raise some eyebrows. Apparently the tracking feature will run in the background on smartphones whether or not the user is actively engaging with the app, and Facebook will use that location data to tailor ads to customers based on their current whereabouts as well as their daily habits.

Facebook wouldn’t be the first to tackle location-sharing features. Apple launched Find My Friends in iOS 5, and Google introduced Latitude back in 2009. There are also dozens of location-sharing apps and services targeted at family, businesses and other communities like Life360 and Location Labs – which powers the mobile carriers’ family locator services – while numerous social networks offer check-in capabilities, including Facebook.

Facebook will have to make any location-sharing service opt-in only due to privacy concerns, and even consumers who have no qualms with broadcasting their physical presence will probably take pause before activating the feature. Facebook users have vast networks of friends, many of which with you wouldn’t want to share something as sensitive as real-time location. For a Facebook location service to get uptake, it will probably have to make the feature’s sharing controls very granular.

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Qualcomm already has quite a bit of history in the location field. A decade ago it launched the GPSOne program with the aim of putting assisted-GPS chips in almost every Qualcomm-powered phone in order to meet government emergency location requirements. Qualcomm estimates that its location engine has been integrated into more than 1 billion phones and devices.

GPSOne has since been renamed IZat to reflect that a lot more than GPS is used to determine location. Today Qualcomm chipsets use the Russian satellite constellation Glonass as well as GPS to get coordinates. They also augment that satellite data by measuring signal strength of nearby cellular towers, which network-based servers use to extrapolate location. Given the amount of investment Qualcomm has already made in the IZat system and the sophistication of today’s phones, adding indoor location capabilities is a relatively easy task, said Leslie Presutti, senior director of product management for Qualcomm’s Atheros division, under which IZat operates.

Like other indoor location providers, Qualcomm is making heavy use of Wi-Fi signals to determine location within a building, but it’s also utilizing cellular and GPS signals when available and further refining positioning data by using the gyroscope, accelerometer and compass sensors in the device. By tapping into all of those tools, Presutti said Qualcomm can determine location within three to five meters.

Qualcomm is also offering a network-based location option designed to work over access points that use its Atheros Wi-Fi chipsets, and it is partnering with Wi-Fi infrastructure giant Cisco Systems to support its access points as well. Though not as accurate as the mobile-based approach, the network can deliver a reading within five to seven meters to phones that don’t have IZat-capable chipsets. It’s not ideal, but given the new indoor software is only just debuting on Qualcomm’s latest Snapdragon processors, it will take some time before a critical mass of phones will be able to support the new technology, Presutti said.

Indoor location-based services are still in their infancy, but a growing number of small companies are vying with the big mapping providers like Google to carve a niche in this potentially lucrative space.

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Users of the $49.95 app — it’s a one-time fee — can supplement their navigation and traffic map needs with these new social location apps that are typically used in a standalone version. Link the TomTom app to your Foursquare account and you can find, navigate and check-in to Foursquare locations in a single app:

Find millions of exciting places to visit by searching with Foursquare, even if you are not a Foursquare user. Log into Foursquare and you can also check in at your destination so you don’t miss any points on your way to becoming its new mayor.

The same holds true for the Facebook Places integration from the last software update, making it easier and faster to find locations that friends have recommended.

Given that GPS-enabled smartphones and navigation software have provided a lower-cost option than single-purpose navigation devices, this is a smart move by TomTom. Adding both search and check-in features for Foursquare and Facebook adds value to users of both social networking services, allowing companies such as TomTom to not be shut out of revenues by Google Maps and other mobile apps that replace standalone GPS navigation devices.

This So-Lo-Mo trend is a concept we’ll be talking about in more detail next month at our Mobilize 2012 event in San Francisco. In particular, we’ll be chatting with Zillow CEO Spencer Rascoff to better understand how the traditional location-based real estate market is moving towards a mobile-friendly environment with social networking opportunities.

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Earlier this week, the company scoured the data and shared the results in a blog post. It turns out GPS is twice as accurate than Wi-Fi for very fine data and, possibly due to low-end devices with inexpensive GPS chips, Android devices as a whole are less accurate than iPhones.

Yelp took a deep dive into the geolocation data from June and ended up with a nice chart showing the difference in accuracy from check-ins on the iPhone, Android devices and the iPod touch, which has no GPS and therefore relies on Wi-Fi-based location data.

As expected, the GPS devices are far more accurate than a Wi-Fi only device. Nearly 60 percent of all Yelp check-ins were within 0.1 miles of the actual location on iPhones in June, while just 30 percent of iPod touch check-ins were as accurate. Surprisingly, the Android devices were closer in accuracy to an iPod touch, even though nearly all Android devices have GPS chips.

If you can live with some tolerance for location data, Wi-Fi isn’t terrible: Yelp’s data shows that 79 percent of all iPod touch check-ins were within a mile of the business location.

That doesn’t sound like it’s good enough to ever displace GPS when out and about, but Wi-Fi certainly works better for indoor location needs such as in a mall, large retail store or educational facilities. As a result, both types of geolocation methods are likely to be used in a hybrid form for some time to come.

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I’m not sure we should be surprised by the indoor walking maps, although they’re sure to be welcome in malls and large stores. If I recall correctly, when Google showed off its Project Glass demonstration, the simulation showed indoor maps to find a particular area in a store. At least we won’t need to wear the “Google Glasses” to get that functionality now.

Note that these features are limited by geography. Google Offers for Maps is U.S.-only, while the indoor walking directions — a beta — will work in the U.S. and Japan. Here’s a brief look at the Google Offers functionality within Maps; an approach I like better than checking in on Foursquare to get a deal or discount.

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According to Skyhook, TweetCaster joins three other apps on the Kindle Fire —  MapQuest, HopStop and deCarta — that offer location-based services (LBS). Without a GPS radio, other developers can bring LBS to their Fire apps with Skyhook’s Location Engine and SDK. That’s helpful to end-users of course, but also to developers who have already developed Android apps that use the GPS radio in a phone or tablet.

Why is that important? It eliminates a key problem, suggests Skyhook’s CEO, Ted Morgan: offering multiple versions of the same app but with different features.

“The Skyhook SDK not only provides superior location reliability, but also protects developers from increasing fragmentation. Developers can build their app once and avoid worrying whether the device has proper location support.”

Unless we someday have a ubiquitous Wi-Fi network that covers the planet, I wouldn’t expect Wi-Fi to completely replace our Global Positioning System for location. In app-specific instances however, using wireless networks to gain reasonably accurate locations will be a great substitute for years to come.

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Except there’s one more thing.

My sources are telling me that the company is going to make some sort of announcement around NFC technologies at the event as well. The Places product will have some NFC elements built into them, and the social network is working closely with some hardware vendors. I am pretty sure we are going to find out more details in a few hours.

NFC is a short-distance wireless technology, and it is likely to be a catalyst for m-commerce. Some research groups believe that by 2014, one in five phones will be NFC-enabled.