Gowalla

I’ve started using an application on my iPhone known as Gowalla. The premise is similar to FourSquare’s, which I was never quite sure about. The entire app is based on the idea that someone wants to know where you’re at or have been and that you want to make a game out of it.

Gowalla's Mascot

The Skinny

When you sign up for the service, you receive a passport. As you go about town and check in at various user-created locations, you gain stamps in your passport.

Every stamp is a theme centric icon of the category of place you’re at. At a theater? Well, you’ll get a set of curtains. Coffee shop? You get not one cup but two! The icons seem to be where the root of my love for this app is.

Trips seem to be an integral part of the app. They’re essentially a list of locations put together to form an interesting little walk-about in your area. Currently, these include campus tours, pub and club crawls, and guided tours (or scavenger hunts) of places like zoos and parks.

It even integrates with Facebook and Twitter, which ensures my mom feels included. She gets to think she knows what I’m doing and where I’m going.

Opinions and Such

Look! We're on Gowalla!

The app seems neither competitive nor cooperative. The ideas they present are enjoyable and fun, but a lot of the features could be expanded to give the game more of a draw. Neither items nor trips pull in the users to participate in any particular way.

Trips could be expanded to include not just the largest of the US cities, but all US cities. These, just like spots, could be user-generated. Perhaps they would only show up online after a certain amount of people voted for the trip or checked into the locations on the trip.

Appropriate finds ftw.

The items are a wonderful idea and have great implications. When you look at an item, the item detail shows you the number of unique owners and where they picked the item up. Users should be encouraged to drop an item everywhere they go, trading items out for others. Having an item where the first user was halfway across the United States (or better yet from another country entirely) just seems like an awesome idea to me. It would help illustrate how the ease of travel and connections in the internet age have changed the way we do things.

Where to Give Feedback?

What they need is a FAQ for the intended use of the different aspects of the game. Thankfully, their support via Get Satisfaction is monitored. It can be difficult to find their account from their main Gowalla site. They’ve neglected to put a proper link there, and instead have opted to put one on the main marketing site for the development company. I don’t think their intention was to hide it, but they could have been a bit better about the linkage.

I’m looking forward to when users will be able to easily find one another based on where they frequently go. All in all, this is a beautiful and greatly interactive program. It’s based on a growing community of users that input their own data. We just need a way to truly customize our cities.