Do you check-in in physical places using FourSquare, Gowalla, Facebook or another location-based social network?

As one of the fastest-growing social network behaviors, location networking has vast implications for bettering our experience in the meat space (aka real world). However, it opens up lots of questions about data collection opportunities, privacy and the difference between novelty and value.

This panel tried to address that opportunity: Future of Collective Intelligence: Location Location Location featuring Naveen Selvadurai from FourSquare, Claudia Lagunas from PepsiCo (client) and Tero Ojanpera from Nokia.

Location social networks have historically been about “I’m cool and checking in here” layered with location-based marketing couponing. Yawn. But we’re moving toward location-based retailing and social experience, which I personally think is thrilling.

For example, Ojanpera suggested Pepsi (client) could watch check-ins in Austin to know what areas are attracing a lot of consumers so they know where to ship products. He also suggested rather than doing sample polling for traffic patterns, civic governments could use real-time data as reported by passive mobile data.

Every month, Nokia gets 1.5 billion data points from users around the world. That’s a significant amount of data the company is collecting that gives the company insights into customer behavior and has the potential to be used for building new technologies (e.g., a stop light that knows you’re coming and turns green). They are looking for opportunities to give consumers access to their own data, and they think consumers will increasingly find meaning in having it.

FourSquare is using historical data to offer an improved social experience. For example, FourSquare knows if you were at the same restaurant a year ago, or if you haven’t checked in at the same place as a friend for four months. Their new leaderboard offers this data back to users to help create a more social environment.

Although feature phones are increasing in popularity, global markets are still SMS/text messaging-reliant due to technology and data availability. Smart phones may not even work in these countries because they don’t have the network to support them.

Group messaging services like GroupMe and Beluga mimic physical group behavior using advanced mobile technologies. Group messaging is essentially a higher level atop SMS — taking the social communication power away from the phone companies and moving it to the apps themselves. Most of the world pays per SMS message, and these innovations remove us from the old dependencies of traditional communication tech.

Technology makes it very easy to capture user data (photos, status updates, check-ins, etc.), and it will continue doing that. There are even devices you can wear that capture how many steps you take. In the next few years, people will build better filters and algorhythms so they can extrapolate this data into new and compelling uses.

Lagunas says the consumers will ultimately tell us where the boundaries are for privacy and using their check-in data. Brands will need to create experiences that are very exciting for the user. This ended the discussion on privacy, which was unfortunate.

Although we learned the moderator’s dog’s Facebook url, as well as if the audience thinks you should check-in at work, these important questions were left unanswered: Are check-ins commodities and how will they be leveraged? Will geo-location reach a saturation point? What privacy implications does location-based innvoation create? What is the future of collective intelligence? (note: this was the panel title)

As a coralary to the unanswered privacy questions, TechCrunch actually published an extremely compelling post yesterday on the walled-garden approach to app development, the secret kill switch programmed into our phones and the difference between movie plot threats and reality.

I wish the moderator of today’s panel and the gentleman from yesterday’s privacy panel had the read this article. It has extremely interesting themes I would have loved to hear the panelists address.

Key quote:

Ten years ago people were horrified at the notion of Intel adding a unique ID to all of its processors. Today every phone has a unique ID, and yours is probably uploaded to apps’ servers multiple times a day. Not so long ago, people were outraged that Amazon could and did arbitrarily delete books from users’ Kindles; last week they clamored for Google to exercise essentially the same power. Giving all that power and control to Amazon, Apple, Google and Intel in exchange for security may ultimately be a reasonable and necessary tradeoff — but that kind of centralization of control still makes me more than a little uneasy.

As the developing world adopts smartphones as their first and only computers, Android and iOS will increasingly dominate all Internet traffic….

And you can’t even escape the app garden via your browser, because your browser is, in and of itself, an app. While we weren’t looking, the walled garden won.

Compelling stuff.