Got invite for check.in beta (it’s for checking in to all your various Foursquare-y things at once). They deal with naming conflicts between different services by a “magical matching process” which, when it fails, asks you to tell it which entries correspond to each other. Pretty good trick and something I sort of embarrassingly hadn’t considered—the repository of checkin-able locations that includes how they are listed across the different services is a huge asset and if the power-users of these services really care enough to use more than one at a time then surely they can be convinced to make their own lives easier by providing the information to consolidate their favorite spots into a single check.in location.

Right now check.in is just foursquare, britekite, and Gowalla (and the last only “experimentally”). Interesting dilemma for other services—opening up an API to allow check.in checkins probably means more users but a lot of those users will have their interactions totally mediated by another application. Raises the question of what any of these companies hope to accomplish in the long term. Also, shouldn’t Facebook just buy this thing if they’re serious about storming the location “market” (is it still a market if maybe no one is really making money yet?).