The mobile social travel diary and game Gowallalaunched version 3.0 of its popular, if market-trailing, service last week and it’s a great example of the potential and the pitfalls of contemporary social software.
If you’re familiar with Facebook Places or Foursquare, Gowalla now reads friends’ updates from and posts your check-ins to those other services, if you like. That’s a really fantastic feature. Unfortunately, the way it’s poorly implemented is one of several heartbreaking problems with the new version of Gowalla. Here’s an update on what Gowalla does and doesn’t have to offer in the heated competition to be our primary mobile companion in travels throughout town and the world.
If you’re not familiar with Gowalla, here’s how I describe it. It’s a beautifully designed mobile app that lets you “check in” at various locations (a restaurant, the train station, a park outside of town) and make a record of your visit in a number of different ways. All your friends will see that you checked in there in their Gowalla feed of check ins. You can post photos of the place that future visitors will see. You can leave comments about your visit. You can pick up or drop illustrated objects in a place, which subsequent visitors will be able to see there. (That part seems a little silly.)
With the new update to the service on Thursday, you can now sync your accounts and publish your check in out to Facebook, Twitter, Foursquare or Tumblr, too. Check ins on Facebook Places and Foursquare can now be automatically delivered to your Gowalla newsfeed as well. That’s great news: it means you can enjoy the unique features and approach that Gowalla brings to location-based social networking, without missing out on networking about where everyone has gone with your friends using the larger services Facebook and Foursquare.
As a regular Foursquare user who left Gowalla some time ago because it felt like far more people I knew were on Foursquare – I can’t tell you how good it feels to be able to use one of these services but see check ins from friends on other services in my feed of updates. And to be able to use Gowalla without leaving my check-ins in a tiny ghetto of activity, out of sight of my far more friends on Foursquare. It’s fabulous, it’s a truly liberating feeling (Like being able to call a Verizon customer from an AT&T phone! Imagine!) and something like this simply must be done by the other services.
Unfortunately, the wonder stops at the early implementation. You can see the names of the places people are checking in, but there’s no way to learn more information about those places or see previous places the people have been. You just get a name, avatar and text place name dumped into your update feed from Foursquare or Facebook. Gowalla makes no attempt to let you look at the Gowalla places page for the place your friend checked-in at. It makes no attempt to group their check ins from the past together. It’s terrible.
No doubt it’s not easy for Gowalla to know that the Joe’s Deli in Portland, Oregon that your friend checked into on Foursquare is the same Joe’s Deli in Portland, Oregon that Gowalla has a list of other check-ins and photos for. But something has to be possible. Could it guess? How about we all connect up with the editable database of locations on Factual.com? Just defer to Foursquare or Facebook? Or something, but this is a real bummer.
Short of some kind of universal database of places, the cross posting of check ins from other services ends up being a real let-down.
Other things that are bad about Gowalla
I want to like Gowalla, it’s beautiful and this new cross-posting feature is great. After using Foursquare for the last six months though, coming back to Gowalla reminds me of some of the things that are so upsetting about it.
The worst thing about Gowalla is that you cannot leave a comment on a place. This is absurd. You can post a photo that becomes associated with a space. You can post a comment on your check in, but it gets washed down the stream with other check ins. If a restaurant has a good or bad dish, you can’t post that on Gowalla and expect future visitors to see it. That’s crazy.
Last night I was stuck at an old train station in a small town in Oregon. I looked up the train station on Wikipedia on my phone and found that the beautiful building it was in was built almost 100 years ago, after two prior stations in the same spot were destroyed by fire. I checked in at the station on Gowalla and left a comment about the building’s history, along with a link to the wikipedia page so future visitors could read more. Then I left a comment about all the people this little train station reminded me of, since I’d first been in that neighborhood 20 years ago.
I posted the comment and where did it go? Into the stream of check ins, hardly tied to the space itself at all. On Foursquare, if I left that comment as a tip, all future visitors of to the train station would be able to see it and friends of mine who checked in anywhere within 200 yards or so would get a push notification that I had left a note nearby. Gowalla doesn’t offer anything like that.
On Foursquare, I’m following a local Portland arts and culture magazine and I get recommendations of nearby restaurants when I check in downtown. I’m following TV’s History Channel. When I checked in at the Waterfront Park for last Summer’s Blues Festival, Foursquare pushed a note to me from the History Channel. Since I was following that account, I was told that the park was the site of the biggest rally in the whole Obama presidential campaign in 2008, with the number of people in attendance and the date. I told the kids I was with that history and we all said “thanks Foursquare!”
Places are annotated in Foursquare. I leave “tips” wherever I go advising people to read about the history of the space, or think about the unique things you’ll find there and what they mean.
Foursquare allows people to annotate the real world around them. Gowalla offers nothing like that. Nothing! It’s absolutely heart breaking, because I so want to use this beautiful, photo-supporting, interoperable location based network. Instead of Foursquare. Foursquare has the features that are most important to me, though. Gowalla has dorky illustrated objects without meaning you can drop or pick up.
Gowalla has photos, but you can’t zoom in on your photos or be reminded what places you took them in. You can see the check-in activity of people on the service, but there’s no place to learn more about the people. At least Foursquare has links to peoples’ Twitter or Facebook profiles inside their Foursquare profiles. Why don’t these services allow you to enter some text to tell people about yourself? That’s such a strange oversight.
You can’t message people through Gowalla like you can every other check in service. You can’t follow organizations or brands easily. Interested in Gowalla’s “trips” collections of places to check in? It’s all done by hand and there probably isn’t anything near you, if you’re not in one of a handful of cities around the US.
No one has really nailed this sector yet, there’s a clear opportunity for someone to come in and do it really well. When they do, they need to pick up on interoperability and cross-posting where Gowalla has left off.
For now, Gowalla 3.0 is more disappointment than excitement.
