Gowalla Goes To Facebook

It was announced on December 5th, on the Gowalla blog, that Gowalla was going to Facebook. It's a talent acquisition and not a product acquisition, so unfortunately the Gowalla app will be put to bed early in 2012. You will be able to export your data but early next year the app will be closed down.

This is a real shame. I really love Gowalla. For me it was always a different user experience to Foursquare. Gowalla, for me, was always more about discover-ability rather than simply checking into a place to become mayor. For each check-in you made you received a stamp in your passport. some places were featured and had their own icons and there was always a challenge to get these graphically stunning icons into your passport. The UI designers at Gowalla are great. It's no wonder Facebook have acquired them.

There was always the comparison with Foursquare, but for me Gowalla stands out above Foursquare on the usability and ascetically pleasing stakes. Possibly to avoid the comparisons, Gowalla re-launched itself as a crowd sourced city travel guide service in September. I loved the look and feel of this re-launch as well, however for me there were two issues with the re-launched service:

1. Roaming Data costs! Having a crowd sourced travel guide is fantastic (it's an idea very close to heart), however when I am going to need this most (In Europe) is when I am in another country, so when I am roaming! It's going to be a nasty shock when I discover all these cool places on Gowalla, then get home and see my roaming data bill. Cue severe holiday hangover! A mechanism around this of course would be able to download the city guides to your device prior to going and then allow offline usage. Check-ins could simply be queued until you are back on WiFi, or back on your home network. Guess we unfortunately won't be seeing this feature :-(
2. Also with the re-launch they removed access to your passport page! This was the page where you could see all of the stamps of places you had visited and the count of your passport stamps! this was a small feature that I actually really missed. It's not really the point of a travel guide service but when I was growing up I was always fascinated with travel and looking back through my passport at all the stamps I had collected along the way. Living in Europe now there are no stamps! Confound the EU I say! ;-). The Gowalla passport icons were a visually stunning way to look back at your recent trips you had made. As I say it's no wonder Facebook want the Gowalla UI team.

These (personal) issues aside, Gowalla you will be missed. for several years you held a prominent place on my mobile phone idle screen.

Good luck.

cheers

m