gowalla

The Demise of Gowalla

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On Monday, Gowalla announced that the two co-founders of Gowalla and several of its staff were moving to Facebook shortly and that the service would be closing sometime in January. Having formally launched at SxSW 2009, the site will therefore be gone before its third birthday.

This hasn’t come as much of a surprise for those following Gowalla over recent months. Foursquare has been the big elephant in the room, attracting more attention and having a much larger user base. For a while, Gowalla had a niche – the design of the web site and app was much better, and there were features like Trips (where you could create a list of venues, or ‘spots’ to visit) and virtual items that you could collect. But earlier this year version 4.0 of the app was announced, which removed several features, including items, and tried to focus on travel guides.

This was not well-received. For a while I’d been trying to use both Foursquare and Gowalla, as they both offered something different, but the 4.0 update put me off. Gowalla wanted to focus more on ‘stories’ – not just individual checkins taken in isolation, but say catching a plane, staying in a hotel, visiting attractions and then coming home as one story – or at least this appeared to be the intention. Sadly this wasn’t the reality – ‘stories’ were just individual checkins.

There have also been problems with the API, as mentioned in this blog post by Ben Dodson, which saw several third-party services turn away from Gowalla recently – especially since the 4.0 update. All the while, Foursquare was adding new features to their site, without removing anything or alienating its core user base.

So what now? Gowalla is presently still around and you can still download the app from the iOS App Store, but presumably new user signups will end soon. An export feature has been promised to allow you to retrieve your data but it isn’t live at the time of writing. Even though several of the developers are going to Facebook (the others have been sacked, apparently), it’s a ‘talent acquisition’ which means that Facebook is essentially buying out the staff and not the product, so any data you have on Gowalla will not be transferred to Facebook. This isn’t the first time Facebook has done this – box.io was one of the most recent services to be ‘aqhired’ by Facebook where the developers moved to FB and the service shut down. Still, if you think Facebook is an evil privacy-stealing flying purple people eater, then once you’ve exported your data you can delete your account.

While it’s sad to see Gowalla go, this is potentially good for Facebook, and its new profiles that are aiming to document your life as a story (as far as I can tell). Gowalla’s talent could well be very important in making this a good feature.

As for Foursquare? On the one hand, with Gowalla out of the picture, it has less competition, and could gain favour with ex-Gowalla users if it allows them to import their data and gain badges retrospectively. However, this new deal with Facebook could see Facebook Places resurgent, and while Foursquare has over 10 million users, Facebook has hundreds of millions. Quite what Facebook plans with respect to its location based features remains to be seen but this acquisition shows that it’s more serious about it than some of us thought.

Foursquare Thursday – Are its competitors withering?

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A screenshot of items on Gowalla

A couple of weeks ago I focussed on the huge number of new features that Foursquare had rolled out in a four week period. Things have quietened down a bit since then – although there has been an updated Android client to include events and better photo support to match the iPhone, as well as the ability for staff to reverse venue merges, SU2s can edit venue descriptions and a new URL format for venues on the web site. But the service is still very much alive and innovating.

Alas the same cannot be said for its competitors – Gowalla, Facebook Places and Google Latitude.

A couple of weeks ago Gowalla announced the removal of some features from the platform in the next version. Items, like those shown above, will be removed completely; Notes will be removed pending a new implementation to come later, and Pins (like Foursquare’s badges) will see the ‘fat trimmed’ from them. There will be other new features introduced but the announcement doesn’t expand on what these are.

Now while I prefer Foursquare, I do use Gowalla and have cr.osspo.st configured to push my check-ins there as well, and it’s a particular shame to see Items removed. Gowalla stated that fewer than 0.5% of its users actually used items, and there seemed to be a lot of confusion about their purpose. If Gowalla made more effort to explain the role of items, how to get them and why you should drop them at spots then maybe more people would use it – it’s one of the features that makes Gowalla unique.

Foursquare had a similar problem with check-in points before Foursquare 3.0 was released – they didn’t seem to serve much of a purpose and were open to abuse. But rather than remove the feature completely, Foursquare overhauled and improved the points system and re-introduced the leaderboard to encourage competition between friends, and now it works well.

Without Items, the differences between Gowalla and Foursquare are almost minimal. Foursquare’s new Lists feature is very similar to Gowalla’s Trips, and Foursquare’s design improvements mean it’s not far behind Gowalla in terms of appearance. There’s now very little that’s unique about Gowalla and it’s a shame.

I also mentioned that Facebook Places. A recent Business Insider article suggests that Facebook is scaling back its Places feature, and so rather than you checking in you would simply add a location to your status updates and have a choice of venues to do so. Facebook updated its iOS app this week and whilst the standalone checkin feature is there, you can also attach a location to a status update. Facebook also recently discontinued its Deals feature in the UK (not sure about the US) which competed against Foursquare’s Specials, where businesses could offer special deals to those who checked in.

And finally Google Latitude. Earlier in the year an update allowed users to check into anywhere that existed on Google Places, rather than just updating their location co-ordinates, but there hasn’t been any changes since. With the advent of Google+, it may be that Google decides to focus on the location-based elements of that instead, similar to what Facebook is doing.