I’ve recently been trying out Gowalla, a location-based social network that launched at SXSW this year along with Foursquare. Foursquare picked up a bunch of early adopters (I’ve been using is since it launched), especially those who used to use Dodgeball, but in the last few months, Gowalla has been ramping up quite a bit.
The two services are similar, with one major difference is that Gowalla uses GPS to verify locations, where with Foursquare you can check in to a location without even being there, something that is often abused. Also, currently Gowalla is only available for the iPhone without a SMS option, but they are currently working on support for other phones.
One big advantage that Gowalla has over Foursquare is that it can be used anywhere around the world. Foursqure is only in available in a few cities at the moment, with plans to expand in the future.
Like Foursquare, Gowalla also has a game layer. You can pickup and drop items at various locations. Dropping an item lets you become a founder of a location when you enter it into their database. Gowalla also has a “Trips” feature that encourages your to explore new areas in a city.
Another thing that sets Gowalla apart is their design. They use a clever icon set for various types of locations as well as many custom graphics for featured spots.
The Next Web and TechCrunch both recently did extensive reviews of Gowalla.
The best thing about Foursquare and Gowalla is that they encourage people to step away from the computer and leave their home to explore the world around them.
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Gowalla has a much smaller set of marked spots in San Francisco than Foursquare at the moment. It’s not hard to become a founder of a lot of spots very quickly right now.
Yeah, I mentioned in the post that they’ve only really started to ramp up in the last couple of months. So now’s the time to become a founder. Last night I was showing Matt Mullenweg Gowalla right after I became founder of Automattic. They’ve made custom graphics for companies like Twitter and Digg, so I’m sure they will for Automattic as well.
Ask and ye shall receive: http://gowalla.com/spots/32289
The ‘Trips’ feature is awesome, and a great way to explore a new (or even familiar) city. After using both Gowalla and FourSquare for a while now, I must say that it’s hard to choose one over the other at this point, and will be interesting to see which service comes out on top.
http://gowalla.com/users/CoryOBrien
I really like Gowalla and hope it picks up a bigger following. At the moment, I cannot use Foursquare and since Gowalla is only on the iPhone, most of my friends can’t use it. Can’t wait to see more phones supported.
I’m going to check this out. I’ve been using Foursquare for a while and trying figure out it’s ‘real’ purpose in my life. Wonder if not allowing you to post a visit at a later time from a different location is a good idea – what if you ‘forget’ or the location wasn’t listed properly in the database (a common 4square issue)? The Foursquare idea does have some great marketing potential which hasn’t been tapped yet and since it was developed in NYC, its website is focused on that area alone.
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