Getting ready to go out to dinner? Watch TV? Drink a beer? Even visit this humble blog? Chances are, if have an activity in mind, you can “check in” and share that activity with the world.

When you think “check-in,” you might first think of Foursquare or Gowalla, the standard-bearers of location-based services. But an increasing number of services are expanding the check-in modality beyond your favorite bars and bookstores. The idea of location is morphing such that it really means experience.

But why? Why are we invested in communicating and learning about experiences in this transactional fashion?

• The power of shared/collective experience – We all like to know that we are going through something together. Look at the Heatpocalypse/Snowpocalypse/etc. “locations” that emerge on Foursquare during significant weather events, the hashtag games that crop up on Twitter now and then (like #improvedbands) or just follow the hashtag for something like the Super Bowl or the Oscars (or, my personal favorite, the comic gold that was the opening ceremony to the 2010 Winter Olympics). I like to think that we exist in a state of latent connectivity — sort of like the standby power a phone charger consumes even if a phone isn’t plugged into it — waiting for something or someone to engage with.
• The power of game mechanics - SCVNGR is the poster child of exploiting game mechanics for LBS gains, but other services are (smartly) playing that card, as well — there are even potential applications for game mechanics in the delivery and consumption of online news.
• Inclination to share and communicate – Is it because humans are tribal animals? We are naturally inclined to share and communicate the experiences in our lives. As soon as technological advances have allowed, we’ve seized them to enhance and expand our communications to our own networks and the world at large.
• Inclination to self-organize – For better or for worse, humans are programmed to self-organize. Like I said above, we are tribal. A hashtag, however ephemeral, is a sort of digital tribe, a campfire around which we gather based around a common interest.
• Serendipity - In the context of Foursquare, I once termed it “squarendipity” — the belief that by using the web to align our life experiences, we will uncover common ground and thereby enhance those experience. C.C. Chapman recently blogged an example of the serendipitous applications of Foursquare. (Of course, as we already know, serendipity is not the whole of a strategy, but rather a component of one.)

In a recent post, Mashable provided a good roundup of the check-in boom and some of these themes, going more into depth about the deal and branding aspects of location/experience-based services. The author also raises the question of whether or not the LBS explosion is the consequence of some critical mass of oversharing tendencies, or simply the new standard for self-definition.

Whichever way you look at it, online life and offline life are increasingly becoming just one life, and we are building and adopting technologies to reflect this. In the coming weeks, I aim to explore the dimensions of this evolution and its implications. Stay tuned for future posts on this topic.

Coming next: That’s entertainment

Photo by dpstyles (yes, Dennis Crowley)/Flickr Creative Commons