By Staff Writer – Boonsri Dickinson (@boonspoon)

I’m in Silicon Valley and am unfamiliar with the area. My stomach was grumbling, so I turned on my Foursquare app to find a restaurant nearby.

Success.

More and more people are broadcasting to their friends where they are eating or where they are drinking.

For a while, the leading apps were Foursquare and Gowalla. Booyah’s iPhone app, MyTown, is leading the way in location based apps, with half a million users. The New York Times said “MyTown turns the real world into Monopoly.”

According to Yahoo! Finance:

“We are amazed to see that MyTown is growing in popularity at such a rapid pace – our numbers are more than double Foursquare and Gowalla combined,” Keith Lee, CEO, Booyah, said. “We built the foundation of MyTown as a location-based app meant to evolve and grow over time; we’re responding to the feedback and taking the service to the next level in the upcoming weeks.”

Digg founder Kevin Rose is an investor in Foursquare and Gowalla. Rose predicts you’ll soon see trending locations. And you’ll be able to check the ratios at the bar to see if your odds are good. Watch and learn:

Apparently, Foursquare’s co-founder Dennis Crowley isn’t too pleased that Yelp has also tapped into the Check-Ins feature and has also begun using the leader board system. But Foursquare shouldn’t worry. According to Mashable, Foursquare is changing the world in five ways.

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• Foursquare Who? Gowalla What? MyTown Has 500,000 Users And 31 Million Check-Ins (techcrunch.com)
• Booyah’s MyTown, a New Real-World Gaming App, Zooms Past 450,000 Users (eon.businesswire.com)
• Social location apps: Gowalla vs foursquare (en.onsoftware.com)
• 10 Foursquare Apps You Can Use Right Now (mashable.com)