Gowalla 4.0 Review - Crowd Sourced City Guides

I have been very keen to try out Gowalla 4.0, ever since it was announced the other week at TechCrunch Disrupt, described at the time as a crowd sourced city guide or a social atlas, the opportunity to be more than  a simple check in app sounded very promising.

I really love the concept of crowd sourced city guides, in fact it is a product close to heart as we were planning developing something very similar to this in my final days at Yahoo! Whatever happened to that Yahoo!? If you check you have several patents on something very similar ;-)



So now in Gowalla, instead of simply checking into a location you can view a city guide containing locations of specific interest, I am assuming based on number of check-ins, or as it may be now - stories shared. This gives you an instant overview of the must see locations in the city you are looking at.

Each city guide also contains a set of lists of things you can do. for example in London:

• pub crawl
• tourist trot
• best markets
• etc ...

These equate to the trips in the pre v4.0 of Gowalla, and as a tourist guide offer a great overview of collections of locations, or activities, that may be of interest.

Instead of simply checking in at a location, Gowalla now asks you to start a story at a location. I like this concept of starting a story. A location all of a sudden grows a life, with this feature, as opposed to being simply a number of check-ins. A story can contain a number of people, photos and comments. So a history of a location can be created. 

As part of the revamp of Gowalla, a users passport has had the number of locations visited removed. I must admit that I do miss this. The concept of the number of passport stamps for locations visited was great. Now you can only see a feed of places that you have been that you can scroll back through. However I found that this meant that I would only use Gowalla when I went to new locations as opposed to locations that I went to regularly. If I already had a stamp for a location there seemed to be little need to check in there again the next time I went. So now, with story creation, as opposed to simply checking in to get a stamp, I can see that users will be encouraged to check in to create a new addition to the history of a location. I love that you can now see a location and view what has gone on there.

One thing that might impact usage though. I really like exploring the city guides. However would I do this when visiting another country? With data roaming rates so high I don't think I would. I could see myself reading up on a city before I got there, which in itself is still a great use for Gowalla, but I am not sure I could afford to use it real time when I am in the city! Previously I would definitely have checked into a few places to ensure I got the country pin of the country I was in, and it appears that country badges are still available, although all other badges have been removed. So this I would still do. not sure I would be surfing, except of course on WiFi, while in the city I was visiting in a foreign land ;-). Guess the WiFi use case still works though, but it does limit your usage of the app as a true city guide you refer to regularly during the day as you wander around in tourist mode.

A small gripe with the Android app. I am using it on a HTC Desire S and after shutting down the application the GPS is not switched off. This is a battery drainer at the best of times! When you are wandering about in a foreign city the last thing you want is to have to recharge your phone every 3 hours! I expect this is a bug as opposed to a feature and hope it is fixed soon, so as I say a small gripe. I will test on the iPhone later on, as I have to upgrade to iOS 4.2 before I can!

What I would love to see in an upcoming release of Gowalla, and now as it is modelled as a collection of city guides, I feel these features would work really well,

• In the lists section actually have maps which provide navigation, maybe walking, driving and public transport, between the locations in each list. This would be great as it would allow users to find their way between points of interest. Social navigation for tourists! Perfect.
• Allow users to specify how much time they have, and based in their current location, and based on the number of stories within the area, actually map a route of interest that the user can follow to get the most out of the area they are in.
• Add time into the routes mentioned above. Based on the stories that are nearby take time in to account for the best tourist walk through a city. As an example Buckingham Palace is a building, but when you add the changing of the guard to it, it it a quintessential London tourist destination! Also a bar that loads of people have created stories for might be completely dead before 11pm. Why as a tourist would I want to end up at an empty dive at 9pm, when it doesn't kick off before 11?

There is seriously loads that can be done with the data that Gowalla are collecting. Will be interesting to see what they do with it. The above features I have described are all very close to my heart as I was trying to do these 5 years ago now! To my knowledge none of the LBS apps are yet to introduce the concept of time into the mix as well.

All that being said I really like what Gowalla are trying to do with their revamped app. It has the chance to become so much more than a collection of numbers in a location. It gives the chance to add a social context and history to all of the locations that it's users visit. Shame about the removal of passport stamps but I am sure I will get over it ;-)

Have fun

Cheers

M