The event begins today; Directions Media will not be in attendance. But, with the wonders of modern communications, we can follow what's going on. Here's a preview of what's ahead based on pings from several companies making announcements:

FortiusOne will officially launch of Finder!, the first application of FortiusOne’s GeoCommons Suite. Finder! aims to turn unorganized, unsearchable, and unusable data, thus inhibiting their ability into something useable, so that users can produce actionable geo-intelligence. And, apparently you can visualize the found useful data in a variety of products from ESRI, Google and Microsoft.
My Take: Sounds like this app will intersect a bit with ERDAS' Titan and WeoGeo's self-named offering.

Whrrl is the "mobile social discovery service" from Pelago. It links mapping and micro-blogging, though you don't have to "do anything" because it tracks where you to and compares it with where friends go. In short, you "vote" with your feet! Major announcements are planned for the spring and summer including "iPhone and BlackBerry support, a Facebook app, carrier deals, and LBS and WPS initiatives." Rafe Needleman at Webware revisited Whrrl and offers thoughts on themes that may be found at Where.
My Take: Whrrl seems to be more of a tool to create/find reviews/suggestions of interesting locations than a social network. And, no, I'm not sure what WPS means here. But, this one is hard to ignore - it's got some serious investors.

Lightpole, the company that invites you "to illuminate your place in the world using your mobile phone," plans to announce "both strategic partner and new content significance"
My Take: Sounds a bit like Whrrl, but the "social" aspect, again, is played down.

Schmap, the company behind online and desktop "city guides" is announcing iPhone support. I found Schmap just interesting as a desktop/Web app though I have to say its more compelling on a mobile. The big interface tease? When you preform a local search, results are displayed in a list when the phone is vertical; turn it horizontal to get a map!
My Take: While a bit less social than Whrrl and Lightpole, users can create their own Schmaps, a bit of a different twist.

EveryScape offers up just a tease: "EveryScape will unveil its new global expansion program and new “Real World Online” with enhanced community features."
My Take: Remember, EveryScape was out with its street facing imagery before Google's StreetView and Mapplets. The company may be ahead of Google yet again.

Seero is there to debuting its new GPS-enabled video streams. You'll be able to embed live GPS-ed video via a widget. See more at Mashable. The Seero folks will be broadcasting live from Where you can view the vids at Ogle Earth and GEB.
My Take: This could make for some interesting citizen journalism.

Caroline McCarty at c|net offers up a great primer on the challenges facing location-enabled social networking by looking primarily at newcomer (in private beta) Brightkite, old hat Loopt, and older and Google-owned but rarely heard-from Dodgeball.

Key challenges:

- open the network to all or just some - should the app run on all phones, even ancient ones with no GPS and just texting capabilities? should the app be free? should the app be restricted to certain carriers? should you do a private beta and potential limit networks at startup?

- managing privacy and lists of friends - how do you keep annoying messages out of your "inbox"?

- where do you launch/grow such apps? business-y Web 2.0 (Brightkite was launched there) or social SXSW (South by Southwest, an arts, tech gathering) where Twitter took hold in 2007

Definitely worth a read if you are trying to figure out this space!

E-Commerce Times interviews Brian Knapp, VP of Corporate Communications for Loopt, a carrier-based location-enabled social networking offering. Tidbits of note:

- targeting students/young urban professionals (those tuned in to "happy hour")
- no business users to date (save for non-biz use)
- working with many orgs to offer much privacy support
- differentiators: carrier-centric, automatically updates locations
- futures: current Facebook app, BlackBerry version coming, "excited" about iPhone potential

- MacNewsWorld

ArsTechnica talked with founder and CEO, Martin May. Among the tidbits of note:

He used to work at Local Matters.

The business plan appears, down the road, to include anonymous maps of where users go - specifically to which businesses. Sounds like a "Dash" to track personal behavior. I understand how businesses would be interested in such data; how will Brightkite entice users to provide it? And provide it accurately?

For now locations are updated via Web or SMS.

Senior executives from leading technology companies, speaking at our Location Intelligence Conference last week shared that the entire value proposition for spatial enablement is a "push" to the market rather than a "pull" or demand for the technology. Our editors ask: Are we doing an adequate job of selling the technology to more of the people that will eventually implement geospatial tools with other IT solutions.?Why is it still so hard? What are we not doing well? Will it take another "Google Earth" to push the technology deeper into corporate computing or a new crop of graduates to be more geospatially enlightened?

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Some time ago I noted how the next step in mashups (after map mashup 1.0 - putting locations on a map) was sites making their own data. I typically pointed to Zillow as an example. And, you could add any site that included user generated or user corrected data, I suppose. This week I ran into a mashup that is another sort of next step for geospatial mashups: Twisney.com It's built off Twitter, Flickr and Virtual Earth and from that you can probably guess that it's a way to post real time pics/comments to a map of Walt Disney World.

Users send images (via Twitter or e-mail) and put a location/comment in the subject. The site extracts keywords for locations (there's a reference list, but most things you'd think of should work; if they don't real humans figure out the location) and posts the images 'in real time' on the map. By default no contact address/real name is used, but optionally it can be included. There's no registration to use the service, nor a this time, a business model.

A few things make this mashup interesting:

- limited geography
- keywords (not GPS, or any other location technology involved)
- basic e-mail works; more tech savvy folks can use Twitter
- Disney not involved (too bad for them; it'd be a neat addition for its marketing!)
- quick growth with almost no PR (I found one article dated Apr 25 as I write May 3)
- can you imagine this for say the ESRI user conference?

Big shout out to For Immediate Release for noting this app. Frankly, I'm learning more about social networking from that podcast than from just about anything I read. Kudos to Shell and Neville (they are the hosts).