Among the problems I see with most of these services is that they don't provide anything meaningful to socialize about that is unique to mobile and location based data. For general social banter, facebook seems to have won the turf. To your point, if you're no longer in the hooking up or carousing with friends demo, these apps have seemingly nothing for you.
All that said, I think there's tremendous value potential for overlapping virtual and physical communities. I just think all of these players have been too early and lacking imagination to strike a hit. Now that location aware devices are nearly ubiquitous, the next steps are commodifying and standardizing location data, APIs, etc. It seems inevitable. If there's anything that's going to yank me from consulting/contracting back into full-time startup hackery, it'll be something along these lines.
All that said, I think there's tremendous value potential for overlapping virtual and physical communities. I just think all of these players have been too early and lacking imagination to strike a hit. Now that location aware devices are nearly ubiquitous, the next steps are commodifying and standardizing location data, APIs, etc. It seems inevitable. If there's anything that's going to yank me from consulting/contracting back into full-time startup hackery, it'll be something along these lines.