khal weir | blog

Often hailed as the next big thing in Social Networking, location based applications are increasing in popularity  as smartphones become more mainstream.  Facebook and Twitter have proven that people love to share their thoughts with anyone that will listen, so sharing your location is an obvious next step. The giants in this relatively new market are Foursquare and Gowalla, both use the GPS which is now commonplace in phones to allow users to create and check-in at a variety of locations such as shops, pubs, parks and museums. Achievements (e.g. Gowalla’s ‘Cup o’ Joe’ for visiting 10 different coffee shops) encourage users to explore

I’ve been using Gowalla for around a year now (over 320 check-ins), but after a couple of friends started using Foursquare I thought I’d give it a try too. Initially there doesn’t seem to be much difference between the two apps, they share a lot of common functionality such as posting your check-ins to Facebook and Twitter, but its where they differ that is interesting.

Gowalla allows users to upload photos at their check-ins and to add comments which only their Gowalla using friends can see. The application makes use of attractive graphics and a traveller metaphor – users have a passport, collect stamps and pins and add items to their backpack. Occasionally when checking-in to a location, you will find an item thats been left by another user and when creating a new location you can drop an item to become a founder. As well as adding locations, users can string together a collection of locations to create a trip, such as sight seeing or a pub crawl.

Foursquare is a little more popular and as such has more locations, most of the high street near my work is covered by Foursquare, with only a handful of check-ins available in Gowalla. One of the differences between Gowalla and Foursquare is that user comments are public, users can leave tips such as ‘try the steak!’ which you can mark as done or add to a to-do list. Check-ins in Foursquare are awarded points, although I don’t yet understand the criteria used or what the idea of the points is, also in Foursquare you can become a mayor of a location from repeated check-ins.

Personally, I prefer Gowalla – mainly because its more fun its in appearance and ‘gameplay’, I do like the tips idea from  Foursquare and a number of retailers have started recognising the power of this new phenomenon by offering specials e.g. Domino’s will give the mayor of each branch a free pizza every Wednesday.