Tonight during Microsoft's Internet Explorer 9 keynote, Ari Brixton demostrated what appears to be a new product by Foursquare called Foursquare Playground. Foursquare Playground is somewhat like a virtual world for check-ins and location information. Upon going to foursquareplayground.com, you are first asked to allow or deny location features using geolocation in HTML5. Once you allow, you are able to see places around you in the form of virtual buildings. Each building takes on its own look in order to match what type of place it is.

Here's where it really gets cool. Any building with a red dot above it means that people using Foursquare are currently checked in to that location. If you click on a building, you then see those users' characters in the building to show that they have checked in, tips from a treasure box, the major in a portrait on the wall, and more.

Foursquare Playground is definitely the most innovative feature I've seen for location sharing services. While I love -- and continue to use -- Gowalla, I praise Foursquare for going above and beyond the competition. It's definitely something I will be trying out. Right now the only downside is that if you don't live in heavily populated areas, Playground could potentially get very boring very quickly. That said, I suspect we'll be hearing a lot more about it during SXSW.