WeePlaces adds Gowalla and Facebook to visualize check-ins

WeePlaces, a service which visually maps your check-ins on location-based services, has integrated with Gowalla and Facebook, giving users the ability to see where they’ve announced their location to friends across Foursquare, Gowalla, and Facebook Places.

Foursquare and Gowalla are the two most popular check-in services, while Facebook has recently entered the market with its Facebook Places. All three services have application programming interfaces which allow services like Weeplaces to pull data from them. Weeplaces is an example of the next generation of location-based services which are building off check-in providers as a platform. The application originally launched with integration with Foursquare, which now has 4 million users — but it’s now able to embrace the sector’s growing diversity.

WeePlaces’ interactive map of check-ins is set against a timeline, meaning that users can see friends’ present locations and older check-ins. It looks similar to Google Latitudes, a passive check-in service designed to work with GPS-equipped phones, showing all the points where you’ve recently traveled.

The service was built in a weekend, according to the company, and it sometimes shows. While my editor was able to load his Foursquare check-ins in less than a minute, my check-in history across multiple services wouldn’t load after 10 minutes.

The real question, aside from the site’s performance, for services like Weeplaces is this: Does a mapping feature add to the user experience or make people want to check-in more? Or does the easy access to one’s check-in history on a map raise new privacy concerns, by exposing features that aren’t available on Foursquare’s mobile apps or website, which only show your most recent check-in or the places where you’re the mayor, Foursquare’s term for the most frequent visitor?

A Gowalla representative said the mapping experience should increase check-ins and even suggested that a full integration with Weeplaces is on the horizon.

Asked about a mapping feature, Foursquare founder and chief executive Dennis Crowley said in an email, “We’ll do this eventually.” The addition would go along nicely with Foursquare’s current stats page for each user, which includes total check-ins, new places discovered, top friends and mayorships.

The company behind WeePlaces is Movity.com, a San Francisco, California-based startup. Movity.com is funded by the Y Combinator incubator  and landed a $1.3 million seed round from angels including Epinions cofonder Naval Ravikant, Gmail creator and FriendFeed cofounder Paul Buchheit, and early Google employee Aydin Senkut. (Senkut is also an investor in VentureBeat.)