I’m always amazed at the number of foursquare users who also regularly check in on Gowalla (I’m one of them). Checking in on both, though, can be a real pain. Throw in Facebook Places and you’ve got your work cut out for you. A new service currently in Alpha, cr.osspo.st, attempts to help by syncing your foursquare checkins to Gowalla and Facebook Places all at once. When it work, it works well. You just never know when that’s going to be.

For me, foursquare is the primary checkin app. I love the tips and the recommendations from Explore too much to use another app to check in. Gowalla offers to share my checkins to foursquare (and Facebook Places), and they usually do it very well, but I hate that there’s no confirmation that foursquare received my checkin and it was matched up to the correct venue. Footfeed provides that confirmation, but I’m still missing out on the tips and recommendations.

Cr.osspo.st lets you keep foursquare as your primary app. Once you link your foursquare account, it monitors your checkins in the background and attempts to match them up with Gowalla spots and Facebook Places venues in order to check you in.

Unfortunately, matching venues across services is not an easy proposition. Gowalla’s data is typically fairly clean, but names often vary across the services making matching difficult. Facebook Places data is, at least in my experience, littered with duplicates and inaccuracies, making it nearly impossible to match accurately. Footfeed gets around these limitations by letting you manually match places if it’s unable to find a match, so you know exactly which venues you’re checking in to on each service.

Cr.osspo.st provides no such feature. It keeps a log of the places it was unable to match, but without realtime notification it’s not very useful. You have no idea if it was able to check you in on Gowalla or Facebook Places until after it’s too late to correct the error by checking in manually. They do say that they’ll occasionally go through and attempt to match failed checkins so they’ll work in the future.

So how did it do?

I’ve been using cr.osspo.st for the past week. In that time, I’ve checked in 35 times on foursquare. A total of 14 of them were pushed to Gowalla. To be fair, only 25 of the venues exist as Gowalla spots, so it made a good match 56% of the time.

19 checkins were pushed to Facebook. Given the state of Facebook Places data, it’s impossible to tell how many of them exist as venues there, but none of them were incredibly obscure places. That gives us a 54% match rate.

There were a few oddities as well. Cr.osspo.st pushed another two checkins to Gowalla, but was way off on the matching on both (it somehow matched Cincinnati Museum Center at Union Terminal to Biergarten at Findlay Market, for example). There were also two duplicate posts of the same checkin on Facebook.

Conclusion

In the end, I was most disappointed with the lack of timely notifications that my checkins were completed succesfully. Had I received some sort of notice, I could’ve easily opened up Gowalla or Facebook Places and either added the venue or found the right one and checked in.

In addition, I think Facebook Places and foursquare have two totally different uses. I really don’t want all my public checkins posted to Facebook Places. It’s not a place for the mundane grocery store and coffee stops. There’s not a way (other than making an off the grid checkin) to tell cr.osspo.st not to post a checkin to Facebook Places, where it inundates my friends’ new feeds.

At this stage, Cr.osspo.st simply doesn’t offer enough control to be ready for prime time. I’m afraid I’ll be disconnecting my account (for now, at least) and sticking with either manually checking in on multiple services or making do with the inferior cross-platform checkin apps.

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