South by Southwest (“SXSW”) Interactive wrapped up last week, and one of the recurring themes was how location-based services (LBS) are changing the landscape of social media. When you port social media apps to the mobile phone, a world of LBSs are opened to you.

There are many use cases for LBS, many for social media, and the intersection of the two are even more interesting.

As seen with foursquare and Gowalla, bringing in LBS into a social application that lets you add tips/comments to restaurants, bars, etc. instantly turns it into a quick way to see where the “hot” places are currently in your area. Adding game mechanics (like badges) only makes foursquare even more addictive.

This is the new hotness.

The intersect between Location-based services and social media.

Is it any surprise that twitter started supporting location-based tweets this week? They’re simply keeping up with the trend. I expect to see location-appropriate contextual ads in applications on mobile phones more now. If you’re walking down 5th street, and you’ve given your application access to GPS information, advertisers would love to be able to tell you to drop by their shop on your way to wherever you’re headed.

ShopSavvy, for instance, could push notifications to customers using that app letting them know where deals are in their proximity.

There are detractors. Plenty of people still want to keep their location private. If you’re an at-risk person (in an abusive relationship, for instance) you should think twice before turning on location-based services. More and more websites/applications these days are starting to set very “open” defaults rather than restrictive defaults. As Danah Boyd recently said, we were once a people who kept information private and decided what to make public. Now we are more and more making data about ourselves public by default, and take more effort to decide what to make private.

Edit: A day after I posted this, I found an article by Kevin Nakao which provides more detail on location-based services. It is a great reader and can be found here.

I’ve always been a sucker for geography and statistics. That’s why I was immediately interested in seeing how our customer-base was spread out when I started using Google Maps last week. For the first map I’m releasing here, I wanted to pin a point on the map for every city represented by a customer, but after making the map I realized there was a problem – The United States. There were over 2,000 cities represented by customers in the US alone, and it was just too slow. For that reason, The United States have only one point for each state. Those pins each have a popup which will tell you how many cities were represented by that state. For all other countries, there is a point on the map for each city for which we have a customer. Click on the image to launch the map.

• There are more than 111 countries covered by our customers
• At least one customer lists a residence somewhere in the Amazon Rainforest
• We have at least 1 customer for every state in the USA
• The southernmost city is Christchurch, Canterbury, New Zealand
• The Northernmost city is Lakselv, Norway
• We don’t have a customer who lists a residence in Antarctica yet.

Consider this one a warm-up. My next map will show this same data, but broken out by our datacenter locations. (Dallas, Seattle and Washington D.C.)

I’m a developer here at SoftLayer, and also the resident Photographer (we wear many hats).

We made an official announcement a few months ago regarding our new high density datacenter. It’s pretty rad, but you don’t have to take my word for it — Here’s the proof. Enjoy!