• The Economist, Wednesday, June 9, 2010 2:01 PM

What does The Economist think about "geotagging" services like Foursquare and Gowalla? Hedging its bets, the magazine explains that the services "are ... either about to go supernova, with investors circling like flies, or soon to implode, with I-told-you-so bloggers circling like vultures."

One argument is that "the much more massive Twitter, which recently added geotagging, or Facebook, which is thinking about it, will displace them." But The Economist doesn't buy it. "Gowalla and Foursquare are all about the location; because they do just that one thing, they do it well ... A search for tweets within a mile of The Economist turns out to be full of junk about what people are thinking or reading and very little local knowledge." Furthermore, "Maybe these services will survive, not because you earn a cute little badge for staying up until 3am, but for the same reason you contribute to a wiki -- because by doing so you help build a resource that you yourself find useful."

Read the whole story at The Economist »