Location-based service Gowalla announced this week that it has struck up a partnership with national newspaper USA TODAY to offer special content for the summer travel season.
According to Gowalla community manager Jonathon Carroll’s blog post on the partnership, the deal will offer Gowalla users select content when they check in to more than 40 of the busiest airports in the country.
What happens is this – when you check in at one of these airports, the app will ask if you want to follow USA TODAY on Gowalla. If you do, you’ll get a “Jet Setter” pin for your Gowalla passport and access to airline and air travel news, trips (which consist of a number of recommended check-in locations to visit in the city you’re checked in to), and airport guides, which “let travelers know the cheapest place to park, the quickest way to get through security, the best options for dining and shopping, real-time flight information and more.” Once you’ve followed the USA TODAY account on Gowalla, any subsequent check-in at a selected airport will allow you to access this content.
The partnership does something we don’t think we’ve seen much of before in the LBS sphere – it offers content that directly relates to the activity and reason for checking in to the location you’re checking in to. You’re at an airport, so you must be traveling and you obviously would be interested in information such as flight times or a guide for the airport you’re at. It’s precisely the type of catering of information that Robert Scoble argued for when he discussed the failures of LBS apps like Gowalla, Foursquare and others.
Rather than simply offering users restaurant reviews from a local paper every time they check in somewhere, this new deal takes into account where the user is checking in and offers content based on that. While it is currently limited to a select number of airports across the country, we think it is an important step in the right direction. As Scoble argued, though, the real next step is for applications like Gowalla to recognize that when you check in to a car wash, the coffee shop two blocks away and the nearest public bathrooms should be suggested, not the lamp store across the street.
