(catalystmarketers.com)

Boston-based location check-in game SCVNGR has a lot of overlap with Foursquare, but SCVNGR's main feature is the ability to create treasure hunts. Founder Seth Priebatsch, subject of this great New York Times piece from last year on entrepreneurs and hypomania, started the company to build "a game layer on top of the world."

SCVNGR and foursquare are similar enough that it's not clear yet whether the smartphone world has room enough for the both of them. Users checking in on SCVNGR often have to complete tasks at each check-in point, such as uploading a photo. The startup also introduced check-in discounts in March. This reporter has seen exactly one person use SCVNGR, because Foursquare was "boring now" and mayorships had become too competitive.

But somebody up there likes the Boston underdog. SCVNGR raised $15 million at a $100 million evaluation in January, and now BostInnovation is reporting that Facebook tried to buy the company for its Places and Deals platform and the proposed price was between $60 and $80 million. It wouldn't surprise us if Facebook had made a similar offer to foursquare.

Image of Foursquare's board via Fortune

While some folks might attribute the rumbling feeling that hit New York this afternoon to a 5.9 earthquake in Virginia, Betabeat now knows better. It was the tectonic reverberations of defeat, as Facebook quietly phased out the Places feature of its mobile app which everyone was screaming for months would kill Foursquare.

Checking in to a physical location is an intimate act. You're letting friends and potentially strangers, if you share to social networks, that you're home, at work, at a party or in another country. Facebook, as it did with photos, made it possible to tag other people, indicating when they were at a location with you. Like photo tagging, this spurred a high volume of early activity as superusers essentially forced other users to take part in the act of checking in.

But as part of sweeping redesign today that emphasizes privacy, Facebook is phasing out its Places feature for mobile. It's a tacit admission that Mark Zuckberg's policy of shoot first, ask questions later, of always pushing the boundaries of personal privacy, doesn't apply to all markets. And as with many features introduced by Google and Facebook in the social space, a reminder that the size of your network doesn't always guarantee you can co-opt a market from early movers.

Facebook still has a dog in this fight. In fact, MG Siegler thinks that, having killed Places, they are "doubling down" on location. We disagree. Yes, you can add your location to any status update. But without a dedicated check-in feature, it's doubtful this practice will achieve meaningful scale.

Foursquare is now is a terrific position. They have the best check-in data across the nation and perhaps across the globe. They are growing fast and flush with cash. Backend problems have given way to a torrent of new features. Serious revenue seems to be within reach thanks to the addition of daily deals. There are already more than five billion mobile phone subscribers worldwide, and that number will grow, along with the percentage who own web enabled smartphones. The king of the check in is poised to sit atop a very big business.

But your average restaurant owner doesn't have time to learn and monitor multiple location based services. LocalResponse, which launches tonight, aims to provide a simple, out of the box solution for businesses to connect this new breed of consumer.

LocalResponse, is a pivot from the folks at Buzzd, who built a city guide based on the same concept, aggregating data from different services to help users figure out what locations were trending nearby or relevant to them. "Buzzd is doing well, 500k unique users in march, but the team is now 110% focused on growing Localresponse, a much bigger business opportunity," said co-founder and CEO Nihal Mehta. "We're now in advanced discussions to find Buzzd a good home."

Best of luck to Buzzd scoring some new digs. This time the team is putting that aggregate location data to work targeting consumers and rewarding influencers. ""Our data is more valuable to local merchants and brands than to the consumer," says Mehta. So for example Webster Hall would use Localresponse to see everyone who was checking in and perhaps offer up a free drink to users who shouted out the concert to friends or public feeds.

Sometimes this kind of data is explicit. A check in on Foursquare requires me to select a specific venue first. Folks can also check in on Facebook or attach location data to Twitter posts, but more often users just provide a status update on those two services. So in addition to reading obvious locations, LocalResponse tries to analyze natural language from simple phrases like, "I'm heading to Madison Square Garden!" and extract useful information about where users are.

"I have seen a lot of start-ups try to crack this formula," says Matt Meeker, the Entrepreneur-in-Residence at Dogpatch Labs NY. "But this is one of the few that I have seen that seems like it will actually scale with the growth of these services, and work for local merchants right out of the box."

Localresponse plans to roll out the platform with big brands in the near future, and blue chip names like Coca-cola, Kraft, Nordstrom, American Express and Verizon have signed on to launch loyalty campaigns through Localresponse. It has competition from social media managment services like Social Sprout and the General Assembly based Postling. It will also be interesting to see how things develop with  services that provide the raw material of check in data, like Foursquare for example, which are in many ways competing for the same advertising dollars.