The last time we heard about Loopt, they just launched an update that enabled a massive integration with Facebook—and then they fell off the radar with Facebook Places and Foursquare dominating the social location scene. Not to get left behind, Loopt quickly sprang forward to re-design their application and make location and check-in the center of their interface.

According to Business Wire, this update considerably revamps Loopt’s feature set,

Each new Loopt feature better utilizes the smartphone’s communication and discovery capabilities. All components contribute to a richer experience for people while they’re out and about, displaying a local area’s social relevance for each user. New location-sharing options especially serve people who have become fatigued with checking in.

New survey findings from Loopt show that location-centric messages such as “where are you?,” “I’m here” and “be right there” rank as the top text messages used (43% of survey respondents ranked these in the top three). Accordingly, Loopt’s Ping feature now serves as an all-encompassing location-based text message. With the addition of text, Loopt’s “Ping” is a simpler way to find out where people are, or to mass-message all friends who are checked in at a place (see a video about Ping here).

Communication and discovery is becoming extremely important for the local-to-mobile marketplace. It’s a suite of technologies that combines the idea that a phone knows where the user happens to be and asks for local businesses to pitch in and market by offering coupons, displaying deals, or otherwise enticing the user to come visit them. When a person “checks in” at a particular location, nearby businesses can then have give them an incentive to come inside.

Although, it looks like Loopt is also working on doing away with the “check in” aspect with their newest addition—the background location-sharing option—which enables users to have their location automatically update friends who stray within a particular range. Of course, to protect the privacy of users of this function it requires an opt-in of a much smaller subset of their friends (otherwise all of their friends would constantly know where the user happened to be.)

This sort of thing, background location-updates, could also be used for local marketing but there are a multitude of directions it could go. The good one would be an unobtrusive “deals nearby” button that could light up when a user got within range of a restaurant or electronics store offering coupons or advertising; the flip-side, of course, would be giant pop-ups or nonsense rings pestering the user with gimmicks to visit a nearby store when they walked within its marketing penumbra.

Loopt’s updates seem to imply that they want their users to keep track of each other, to use their service as a sort of social-call to gather (with the location broadcasting). They also streamlined the interface to make checking in quicker and require less button presses and just like local businesses could incentivize user to visit them by offering deals and coupons, Loopt does the same by giving the users a reason to check their phone and check-in.