Foursquare is the King of check-ins, but it looks like Google is about to get into the game with a new feature as part of Latitude that will most likely find its way to Google+. You already have the ability to check-in now, but they’ve added a new feature called Leaderboards, which will rank you based on number of check-ins at each location. Nothing new here, but it’s possible this really isn’t about being the Mayor of Starbucks. The incentive here might have something to do with Google Offers. In a post on the Google support forums, it talks about different status levels including Visitor, Regular, VIP, and Guru. They also suggest that each business could customize the names of these status levels and icons.
In this same post, they discuss Google Offers, but don’t tell us about a direct connection between the two. Reading between the lines, I would think that Google’s plan is to tie this with Google Offers in that the higher your status, the more likely you will be to receive special offers. At this point Google Offers is still at its infancy stage, but I would still suggest checking-in as much as you can now because I would assume it will be counted as Google Offers grows to more locations.
The real question is how many apps do we need to check-in these days? What are you guys using and are you willing to use more than one app for checking-in?
sources: google support, engadget