Jon Mitchell of ReadWriteWeb makes a reasonable argument that the “check-in” as a location based concept is “dead”. Doesn’t look like consumers are adopting check-in applications at a rate that can lead to large scale commercial businesses. Fodder for thought, especially in contrast with Anil Dash’s effusive praise for Foursquare which is not all that stale.
I tend to concur with the later part of the article that speculates that this failure is just part of an experimental, evolutionary process to find a model for continuous location sensing. What we’ve just learned is that continuous location announcement into our social circles isn‘t particularly useful or attractive.
Now personalized capture and derived insights could be a winner. However, that’s a model hard to scale in a big way fast, which is what VCs these days are looking for.