• Mobilebeat et al, Tuesday, September 21, 2010 11:37 AM

The future of location-based services hangs in the balance as consumers and analysts vet the latest version Foursquare's popular iPhone app.

"The big theme seems to be directing users to new locations and activities, rather than just sharing their location with friends," writes MobileBeat's Anthony Ha. "Perhaps this will give me a better answer the next time one of my non-Foursquare friends (and there are lot of them) asks, 'But what's the point?'"

"In version 2.0, Foursquare emphasizes Tips and To-Dos, which are now split up and given prominent placement in the application's bottom navigation bar," writes Mashable. "The goal is to encourage app users to look at Foursquare as a way to easily save the places they want to visit and store activities that might be of future interest."

Version 2.0 features a brand new "Add to My Foursquare" button -- an embeddable button for the web that's already been tested by The Wall Street Journal, and should soon start appearing across a slew of sites, including Time Out New York, Time Out Chicago, Eater, New York Magazine, The National Post, Zagat and The New York Times.

"If you own a business or publish a web page about any real-world location, this very simple button will allow visitors to your website to add going to your location as a 'to-do' item and receive a push-notification to their phones whenever they check-in anywhere nearby," explains ReadWriteWeb.

How will the new service fare? "A tool to convert web traffic into foot traffic, through automatic proximity-based notifications?" asks ReadWriteWeb. "A whole lot of organizations will be putting that on their websites very quickly."

Indeed, "I can see how this will add tremendous value for anyone who manages a physical location, let alone the review and discovery sites like Eater and Racked who have already added them," writes DownloadSquad's Victor Agreda, Jr.

Notes WebProNews: "While the changes only apply to the iPhone version today, Foursquare says updates are coming for Android and BlackBerry."

Adds TheNextWeb: "Good stuff, but one thing is for sure -- no iPad app yet with this release, which is something we were really hoping for."

Read the whole story at Mobilebeat et al »