The companies haven’t disclosed terms, but my understanding is that GoMiso’s investors, who include Khosla Ventures, Google Ventures and Hearst Interactive Media, won’t see all of the $5.5 million they put into the company.

And this isn’t an “acqhire,” because Dijit hasn’t said they’re bringing any of the Miso team on board. They will, however, make GoMiso founder Somrat Niyogi an adviser.

While they’re not shutting Miso down, Dijit seems primarily interested in the service’s IP and technology, not its user base. In other words: Dijit seems to view Miso’s check-in service as a feature, not a company.

My hunch is we’re going to see that thinking play out elsewhere, and that the services that get the most check-in activity will be the services that get the most activity, period.

Twitter, most prominently, has worked very hard to align itself with TV networks and TV watchers. But there are probably more people talking about TV on Facebook at any given time than anywhere else. That’s the kind of thing that happens when you have a billion users.

The Library of Virginia

Viggle, which pays users to “check in” to TV shows, says it will shell out more than $70 million for GetGlue, which lets users “check in” to TV shows, but doesn’t pay them.

The combined company, according to a Viggle press release, will be the “dominant force in the exploding social TV market.”

I don’t think that’s true.

I think that lots of people like to talk about TV shows on Facebook and Twitter, but I’m not at all convinced that there’s an “exploding social TV market” — at least not one where people use specialized services to help them talk about TV.

In any case, it’s a very small market right now.

Viggle says the combined company will have more than 4 million registered users, but the number that matters in the Web world are active users — people who use the service at least once a month. That number is about 1.5 million — a million from GetGlue, and another 500,000 or so from Viggle, says CEO Robert Sillerman.

And those numbers get much smaller once you apply them to a specific show — which is what TV programmers and advertisers care about, since the idea behind the services is that they can boost ratings. Here are a couple of charts that GetGlue provided last month, when it was arguing that it had more influence on social TV than Twitter:

Conclusion: GetGlue might get more people talking about a particular episode of “Modern Family” than Twitter does (live “event” TV is a different story) — but it’s still a tiny fraction of a TV show’s audience. Likely less than 1 percent.

Sillerman’s argument is that Viggle does a much better job of bringing its audience to a particular show, because it rewards them with goodies like iTunes gift cards. He says that on any given night, Viggle can get 100,000 of its users — 20 percent of its active user base — to check in to a program.

If that math applied to GetGlue’s audience, it could bring another 200,000 users. And that certainly could be significant, especially for cable TV shows that are happy to get a couple million viewers. But that’s a lot of assumptions, so we’ll see.

Meanwhile, one other bit of merger math: Viggle intends to pay $25 million, plus 48 million shares, currently valued at $1.30 each, for GetGlue. At the end of June, Viggle had $3.8 million of cash on hand, and said it would need at least $22 million more to fund operations for the next year. Now you can add another $25 million total, which Sillmerman says he will likely raise via debt.

It was, in a word, creepy.

WhosHere, another social discovery application used primarily for dating, is trying its hardest to fight that stereotype.

“We’ve put a tremendous amount of effort into not being creepy,” CEO and co-founder Bryant Harris told me. Users can fill out profiles however they wish, using a pseudonym or an avatar that isn’t a shot of their face. If two people are interested in one another, they can communicate via text or VoIP call within the app itself, without requiring phone numbers.

But there comes a point in e-dating where two people must take things to the next level. And texts and even phone calls can only tell a person so much.

In-app video chat, a feature that WhosHere is launching on Wednesday, is the next natural step for the app. It’s a way of moving forward in connecting with others without the peskiness of having to take the full leap of meeting in person. It’s also a way to verify someone is who they say they are before meeting in the flesh. After all, you never know who’s actually on the other end of a profile.

“Just like in the real world, you go through a progression of how you interact,” says COO Stephen Smith.

I’m not entirely convinced that the world is ready to move to dating via smartphone. But the app has garnered more than five million iOS installations since 2008, so at least some folks are smitten with the premise.

The company, which lets users alert their friends to their location by “checking in” via smartphone from coffee shops, bars and other locations, revealed for the first time that it plans to let merchants buy special placement for promotions of personalized local offers in July in a redesigned version of its app. All users will be able to see the specials, but must check into the venue to redeem them.

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The widespread analysis of the matter was that Girls Around Me was creepy, but that people should realize that when they publish their locations online, bad things may happen. Technology writers, in our enthusiastically adopted roles as the white knights of online privacy, urged readers to lock down their Foursquare and Facebook profiles.

The situation made me curious about what, exactly, location aggregators are being allowed to do with our location data. It’s one thing to share where you are with your friends, or with what you think is a small audience of early adopters. But what’s more tricky — and can often feel icky — is when that information is exposed in a different context.

According to Foursquare, Girls Around Me broke its platform policy by aggregating information across venues. That got the app’s API access yanked. But Foursquare apparently wasn’t effectively policing API use, because the app launched in December and seems to have gone unnoticed until bad press brought it to light.

In its public rebuttal, Girls Around Me developer i-Free argued that other apps, like Banjo and Sonar, “provide the same or more extended functionality using location data provided by APIs of major social networks.”

Is that true? On Quora, Foursquare platform evangelist Akshay Patil went into detail about what rules i-Free was breaking, and what others are doing that’s okay. (A Foursquare spokeswoman confirmed to me that his answer was legit and accurate).

Patil said the specific problem was a part of the Foursquare API called “herenow,” that shows which users are currently checked in at a location. These are the groups of little user faces that logged-in Foursquare users can see when they look up any place within the system (it’s easiest to look up places nearby, but you can manually check any venue). Outside developers aren’t allowed to aggregate that information across multiple venues.

Plus, Girls Around Me was threatening or invasive of users’ privacy, did not have a privacy policy, and misused Foursquare’s trademarks, Patil said.

Patil said Foursquare planned to make the restrictions around this “herenow” data clearer in the future.

But what about those other people-seeking applications built on top of Foursquare, like Banjo, Sonar and wheretheladies.at?

This is where it gets a little tricky, with each app doing something a bit different. Banjo doesn’t use check-ins that are shared only with other Foursquare users. I believe the app used to do this in its very early days, but currently Banjo only aggregates Foursquare check-ins when they are publicly cross-posted to Twitter.

Meanwhile, Patil said that Sonar does use “herenow,” but only on a venue-by-venue basis, and more tastefully than Girls Around Me. The main interface for Sonar is a list of nearby venues with the number of people at them, but you have to click on each place to see the people there, so that seems to be the distinction. There’s also no map view.

Wheretheladies.at, which was a side project of two guys from Path and Milk that was also built around women’s Foursquare check-ins, now appears to have been taken down as well (update: Scratch that; it’s up now). But Patil said that app’s Foursquare API use was okay because it showed counts of number of women at a venue, not user identities.

I know I’m getting deep into the weeds, and I apologize for that — but I think clarity around these details is important. What’s clear is that Foursquare needs to be more vigilant about policing developers access to its users’ location information. And users obviously need to be aware that it’s possible that their check-ins could be misused, so they should be careful.

But the reason people use Foursquare is not to have more privacy.

The point of sharing our locations is to explore new places, meet new people, and brag about doing cool stuff. I doubt that the majority of the population will be volunteering where they are on Foursquare anytime soon. But those of us who want a little more serendipity in our lives now know a bit more about how our information will be used.

(c) Tim Vetter / Flickr

This last weekend, Foursquare founder Naveen Selvadurai announced in a blog post that he was leaving the company, three years after launching the check-in service with Dennis Crowley. In a terse note, Sevaldurai wrote that he would remain on the company’s board and as an adviser, as well as the “single most vocal user” of the popular check-in service.

But, he added, “spring is time for things that are new, and i realize that i have a desire to do something new as well. i’m not sure about my exact next steps.”

Spring forward indeed, because — according to numerous sources inside and outside the company — the impetus for Selvadurai’s departure was a lot more complex and fraught than he or the company indicated.

To be fair, this is not uncommon for start-ups at all. Twitter went through the mother of all contentious partings — twice, in fact — in an ongoing battle among its founders. Tech is rife with similar examples, most often of lesser drama.

And it is much the same with Selvadurai and Crowley, who had together become New York’s highest profile entrepreneurs in recent years. The pair cut a wide swatch of fame, including doing commercials together (see video below).

But times change and sources said that they had come to the conclusion over a series of talks over the last several months that there was no place for Selvadurai any longer at the fast-growing start-up.

“This company grew very quickly and a lot of senior management has been added,” said one person with knowledge of the situation. “It got to the point where Naveen was not in charge of much.”

Indeed, since Foursquare began adding execs — I have a list below — he had become ever more sidelined, ending up with a small team focused on platform efforts and supporting APIs.

“Naveen was no longer heading any meaningful area of functional responsibility, so things got tense,” said another source.

Still, according to several people familiar with the situation — unlike the highly charged parting that took place at Twitter — the departure was not ugly or closely related to either a recent stock sale by employees or its most recent funding in June that valued Foursquare at $600 million.

“Dennis and he don’t hate each other — things just changed,” said one person.

Said another source: “When you look at all the external stuff, Naveen’s leaving was really not tied to anything in particular. The business was really starting to mature … and there is eventually a line in the sand between building a product and building a company.”

Indeed, rather than a scrappy start-up, Foursquare now has 111 employees, up from 50 last year, and has moved into a new phase of trying to evolve from simply being a check-in service.

As that was happening, said multiple sources, the discussions about roles at the company became more pronounced.

“The way this company has been structured, the talks centered on how to contribute to a company and Naveen and Dennis agreed that there was not a place for him day to day,” said one person. “But that does not mean he still will not be contributing to the future of Foursquare in a different way.”

The pair both emailed Foursquare’s staff about the change, although Crowley’s public goodbye on Twitter was short and, yes, sweet:

After 3 yrs, my @foursquare co-founder is moving onto new projects & big ideas. Can’t wait to see what’s next @naveen! naveenium.com/stream/next

— Dennis Crowley (@dens) March 5, 2012

Like I said: Things change.

Here’s the current Foursquare management team:

Dennis Crowley, CEO & co-founder
Evan Cohen, COO (joined January 2010)
Holger Luedorf, head of business development (joined summer 2010)
Alex Rainert, head of product (joined April 2010)
Harry Heymann, head of engineering (joined summer 2009)
Susan Loh, head of talent (joined fall of 2010)
Jon Steinback, director of marketing and communications (joined fall of 2010)

And here are some of the latest stats from the service:

* Over 15 million users (up from just over five million this time last year).

* Over 1.5 billion check-ins.

* Five million check-ins per day.

* Over 750,000 businesses affiliated.

And here’s the video that Foursquare’s co-founders did together for USA Network last year:

Image: (c) Tim Vetter / Flickr

Foursquare co-founder Dennis Crowley sold his company, Dodgeball, to Google in 2007, but he left two years later complaining about the lack of resources devoted to his start-up by the search giant.

Crowley called the experience the “perfect storm of bad timing.”

But that sentiment has apparently shifted considerably. Now, Crowley looks back on his Google tenure as valuable — and said that he’s feeling a lot friendlier toward Google these days.

“You know when people leave a job and they say they didn’t know what they came away with after two years? That’s how I felt when I first left Google,” Crowley said in an interview with AllThingsD. “But I’ve been able to spend time with the folks at Google and reconnect with people there. And now when things come up at Foursquare, [they're] all the challenges and issues I realize I already encountered at Google.”

Could that mean even closer relations in the future?

Crowley declined to elaborate on the substance of his talks with Google, which, in some cases, are with business development teams.

But what about the possibility of another acquisition?

“I wouldn’t disqualify anything,” he said. “The thing that’s important to us is doing the things we want to do, which could be partnering with someone, or it could be continuing to grow the product independently.”

While that’s appropriately vague enough, what is clear is that where Foursquare goes from here is a big question going forward.

Most especially, while it still remains the cool kid at the check-in party, especially as more competitors are checking out — is the party dying down?

Foursquare now claims 15 million users, adding the last five million in just the last six months, a fact it often points to as a sign of success rather than to its aggregate number of downloads.

As a basis for comparison, the popular mobile photo-sharing app Instagram recently touted it had attracted between 14 and 15 million users, amassed in just over a year.

There is no doubt, though, that Foursquare started with a similar bang. Based in New York, the start-up first launched in 2009 as a mobile social networking site that tapped into the inherent GPS capabilities of smartphones.

It was not that unlike the idea behind Dodgeball. But this time, Crowley, along with Naveen Selvadurai, created a fast-growing mobile app that allowed users to broadcast to their friends where they were, while also earning badges and mayoral bragging rights for visiting certain locations.

It took off from there, with Crowley and Foursquare featured in splashy magazine takeouts and even in an ad for the Gap, portrayed as the toast of New York’s entrepreneur scene.

By the spring of 2010, the hot company was reported to be weighing offers from both Yahoo and Facebook, which shortly afterward introduced its own check-in function called Places.

Neither of those deals happened, and this past summer, the company raised $50 million in funding from Andreessen Horowitz, O’Reilly AlphaTech Ventures and others.

That move sent a clear message: We’ll grow ourselves, thanks very much.

Still, despite the cash, Crowley is careful to note that he realizes that times have changed in the location space.

While he said he believes that social media is moving away from the idea of just one news feed, the growing popularity of apps such as Twitter, Tumblr, Instagram and Path imply that consumers have an appetite for multiple apps.

And while data shows that consumers are becoming increasingly aware of geolocation services, it also indicates that the location-based craze hasn’t really caught on yet.

Crowley said he doesn’t put much stock in the most recent Forrester Research report on location-based services. He noted that three years ago Twitter was known as the online network for broadcasting what people had for lunch, before it became recognized as a game-changing technology tool.

That said, a handful of other location-focused companies — Hot Potato, SimpleGeo and early Foursquare competitor Gowalla, as well as Pelago, which was bought by Groupon — have all been absorbed by bigger tech companies in the past 18 months, their value less than expected by eager investors. Instead, they were bought mainly for their entrepreneurial and engineering talent rather than their product or user base.

That’s left Foursquare standing tall, but largely alone.

Crowley said that if the company had to focus on one area right now, it would be nearby discovery, fed by the database that’s been built up over the past two and a half years. He even went as far as to say there’s been a de-emphasis on the flagship “check-in” feature, citing evidence that more people are using the app to get tips without actually checking in.

Within the app, which is available on iOS, BlackBerry and Android, users can also follow friends, get tips on local venues and make to-do lists. Its most recent feature, Radar, pings users when they’re near venues they’ve indicated they want to check out, or in this case, check into.

And, with regard to Foursquare’s other high-profile feature — badge-earning — Crowley likened the whole element to the movie “The Karate Kid.”

“It’s like Mr. Miyagi having Daniel paint the fence, and later he realizes he’s been practicing karate,” Crowley said. “Badges are an important onboarding tool, but from the beginning we’ve said the important thing was data, and now we’ve gotten our users to leave all of these data signals.”

Crowley hinted at more differentiating products coming down the pipeline, and said he wouldn’t be surprised to see more consolidation and sharing among social networking apps, as well as more acquisitions within the industry.

With more than 800 million active users in Facebook’s network, Foursquare might become even more interesting to Google, which has jumped into the social networking space with Google+. Now Foursquare and Google share a common rival in Facebook, which may also help them make up their past differences.

Whether Foursquare could be the buyer, or one of those acquisitions, remains to be seen.

Instead of checking in, Gowalla users will now create “stories” when they meet up to hang out together. These are basically group check-ins, as on Facebook where a user can tag multiple friends at a place. After that, any tagged person can contribute photos and other content to the story, capturing it as a communal experience.

On the flip side, visitors (who don’t even have to be logged in) will be able to visit Gowalla to see local guides that are aggregated from their friends’ “stories,” as well as highlights from local users and content from sponsors and partners. Gowalla is seeding the service with information on 60 cities that will be dynamically updated with new user entries from within their geographies.

As soon as its new app gets approved, Gowalla will be relaunching with upgrades to its iPhone, Android and Web versions (though users can continue to check in through the old versions).

Gowalla CEO Josh Williams said in an interview today at the TechCrunch Disrupt conference that he’s interested to test his hypothesis that “social content has value to observers.”

But don’t call it “the ‘p’ word — a pivot,” Williams begged. “It’s not like we’re doing a music streaming service!”

What might be difficult about this transition is that Gowalla is setting itself up to serve two separate audiences: Content creators and content consumers — groups whose interests and motivations may be quite different. For instance, I could see the new Gowalla guides being really interesting when I travel, but perhaps less so in my home city. There will also be a delicate dance between aggregating public “stories” and those that are published to friends only.

Williams said Gowalla has about two million registered users, with hundreds of thousands of them having used the service in the last couple weeks.

That valuation could be a stretch for Foursquare, which gives users the ability to get deals or connect with friends by “checking in” wherever they are, but so far pulls in little revenue, the people said.

Chief Executive Dennis Crowley is leading the effort and would like to raise $20 million to $40 million, a person familiar with the matter said, though the amount could change depending on the ultimate level of interest in the round.

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The “check-out” is dissimilar to the more familiar “check in.” Its purpose is to let your friends know whether you liked a place or hated it, whereas the “check in,” available from Foursquare, Gowala, Facebook Places and others, is used for broadcasting your location to let your friends know where you are.

The check out feature is ultimately supposed to provide enough feedback to the service to understand your preferences, so it can make better recommendations the next time you’re out.

The application was developed by Bizzy, a wholly-owned subsidiary of ReachLocal, which is a publicly held local online advertising company.

Bizzy, which launched only in November, is trying to create a service that’s more tailored to your specific tastes than Yelp or another provider. For instance, Gadi Shamia, Bizzy’s founder, president and general manager, said it should already know if you are a vegetarian or whether you like Mexican food.

Starting this evening, there will be an update available for the Bizzy application in both the iTunes and Android markets.

To “Check Out,” a user opens the application, picks the place they are currently at, and then ranks their experience based on one of three emoticons: a happy face, a so-so face or the sad face. If they have time, they can leave a more detailed description.

To make more accurate recommendations, Bizzy crunches the information it collects from its users to pair up similar tastes across its database in order to draw conclusions about what someone might like based on similar profiles.

The more check outs it can generate, the better its recommendations will become. Since the service launched in November, it’s collected more than 140,000 favorite places from Bizzy users, and has produced more than a million recommendations, Shamia said.

For now, Bizzy is focused on creating a consumer product and will figure out how to monetize it later, but the tie-ins to ReachLocal’s audience is fairly obvious.

Last month, ReachLocal acquired DealOn Media, a daily deals site for $10 million. Eventually, those deals could show up as sponsored links within the recommendations results on the Bizzy application. Shamia said it’s not live today, but you could imagine of the recommendations it generates for the user, one could be more appealing if it offered 30 percent off.

Bizzy, which has 17 employees, is funded exclusively by ReachLocal and has a separate headquarters in Sunnyvale, Calif.