I got my beta invite for Check.in on Friday and after just a few check-ins, I’m already loving it.

Now, before you let out a heavy sigh and say, “Really? Another location service I have to check into?,” you’ve got to know something about Check.in. It’s a website set up for mobile use that allows users to check into location-based services such as Foursquare, Gowalla, Brightkite and (Seattle-based) Whrrl all at once. It’s catchphrase is “one checkin to rule them all.”
A line at the bottom of the site says it’s a Brightkite product and credits Martin May, Brady Becker and Jordan Harband with the site’s creation after suffering “severe check-in fatigue.” A Tech Crunch post from last month details how it works.

Now, I wouldn’t classify myself as a check-in fatigue sufferer, but I am totally stoked to see this service available. Of course I had signed up for Foursquare, Brightkite, Whrrl and Gowalla, but I had only been using Foursquare. Checking into multiple services seemed to be a waste of time.

As a result, I was missing out on some pretty cool location-based gameplay on Gowalla and some pretty excellent social networking on Whrrl by not using those services regularly. Check.in solves that problem. Now I can check into all four with just one checkin.

So, if you’re into location-based services, you need to go to http://check.in and sign up for a beta invite. I’m not sure how long it will be before a general public roll out of the site, but a quick look at the @checkdotin Twitter feed shows that they are thinking about (and hopefully working on) integrating even more location-based services. I can’t wait to see how it grows and evolves over time.

What other location services would you like to see available on Check.in? — Google? Facebook? Yelp? What else?

There was a dust up on Twitter today about Blippy, the online service that people use to announce their purchases to the world (My Blippy account). I saw it first this morning on a Venturebeat blog post. Apparently, some smart person found out that a specific type of search would churn up Blippy results with credit card numbers in them. Of course, this caused hysteria, lashing out and loss of trust in the service.

Things looked bad — real bad. After conducting my own search, I was surprised to see page after page of results, all with credit card numbers in them. This was enough to set the lynch mob that is Twitter into motion. It wasn’t long before Philip Kaplan responded with a detailed account of what had gone wrong. To my amazement, of the pages upon pages of search results, only four credit card numbers were actually listed.

Don’t get me wrong, that really sucks for those four people. But it was far from a massive breach of the Blippy credit card number database. Still, Blippy had quite a PR nightmare on its hands. For a service completely built on the trust people have in sharing their financial information with it, everything seems to have been lost. After news broke of credit card numbers in Google results, who would trust Blippy again?

I saw tweets left on right all morning from angry users who were closing their Blippy accounts, even after Kaplan’s explanation of the small, contained problem.

This demonstrates what all too many companies don’t appreciate — your most valuable asset is your customer’s trust.

What, if anything, can Blippy do to regain users’ trust? The Next Web advocates giving Blippy another chance by doing the following:

… publicly remunerate the people who had their information leaked, redouble security efforts, and make plain hopefully through a high-profile new hire that security is at the very core of the Blippy product.

What do you think? Can Blippy regain the trust it lost today? If so, how should it go about doing so?

What do you think? Thumbs up? Thumbs down?

What are some other ways we could use vidly?