With the rapid progress of sensing and tracking
technology, more and more location-based services (LBS) and
applications are nowadays available in the market. But while it is
convenient to retrieve various kinds of information via LBS, it is
not easy to build up LBS apps which support a large amount of
users and information. Therefore, it is important for developers
to utilize the free application programming interface (API)
resources available on the Internet for harvesting the benefit of
the cloud computing, particularly for individual developers who
have limited resources. This research explores the benefits of
building LBS service/application based on free APIs and serviceoriented
computing (SOC). Using a social check-in app as
example, the design and implementation of a smartphone
application using the proposed approach will be described in this
article. Moreover, by comparing with some other smartphone
applications which also provide check-in services, the advantages
and potential value of our approach to integrating social network
APIs and SOC concept will be discussed.