by Amanda Etches-Johnson

Gowalla. Brightkite. Loopt. Plazes. Facebook Places. You’ve probably heard at least one of these names recently.

They are all location-based social networks, the latest in online social networking. The idea is to connect people in the real world in order to allow users to find their friends and contacts (and, yes, sometimes strangers as well) if they are in the same vicinity. Location-based social networks are really powered by apps on mobile phones that use a phone’s internal GPS to find a user’s real-world coordinates and allow them to “check in” to a
location from a user-defined database of nearby locations. And, in true user-generated-content style, if a location isn’t in the database yet, any user can add it and check in there.