Good Move for Gowalla

I was literally about to write a post in which I said I preferred Gowalla to the geolocation based social networking service behemoth that is Foursquare, but for the fact that Foursquare lets you search for locations when your phone is confused and Gowalla doesn't.  That's what I was planning to write, but only after checking Twitter for something.  Fortunately, I saw this tweet from @Gowalla:

Gowalla: New in-app feature: Search for Spots! http://gowalla.com/blog/2010/04/what-youve-been-looking-for-search/

Thankfully, my major complaint about Gowalla has been rendered moot.   Gowalla now lets you search for your location when your phone (and my iPhone 3Gs does this a lot) get confused about your location.  E.g., if you are at The Tavern, but your phone thinks you are down by Whole Foods and thus Gowalla isn't even showing The Tavern as an option, you can now enter "The Tavern" into a search box and prompt Gowalla to reconsider its selection of check-in options. 

As for Foursquare, I do like the ability to become a "mayor" of a location.  However, I've found that Foursquare "badges" are either really easy to earn or otherwise very time/location/event specific.  Moreover, their recent announcement of a "celebrity mode" (so lame people can track celebrities with time delayed location report) has lessened my interest in the service.

Foursquare did hit a home run at SXSW interactive, which gave it a huge boost in users.  Moreover, they had already partnered up with BRAVO and some other media outlets (at the time, for event suggestions) plus "cool hunting" site Thrillist.com (which unlike Urbandaddy.com, has an Austin edition).   Thus, I'm sure these partnerships helped them gain popularity along with SXSW.

Gowalla, however, has a lot more potential for partnering with local businesses.   Gowalla features short themed  lists of bars or restaurants for users to visit.  Moreover, Gowalla also features local attractions and sometimes bundles lists of them into little themed tours.  Obviously, there is a huge potential for sponsorships and partnerships with everyday local businesses, city tourism offices, etc. (like a Tito's sponsored bar tour, coordinated and directed by Gowalla, with drink specials for participants when they check in and prizes for those who visit the most stops) as opposed to aiming for large but infrequent events with a high status cache (like getting a SXSW "panel nerd" badge on Foursqaure).   Businesses are already offering Gowalla and Foursquare users deals, specials, etc., but there is a lot of room in the Gowalla model for Gowalla itself to leverage this sort of interest.  [note: if they are doing this, I can't tell that's what they are doing]

And, of course... Gowalla is an Austin based company.  It's good to support our local entreprenuers, as this helps keep Austin dynamic as well as weird.


[Note: a lot of people tell me that they'd use Foursquare of Gowalla, but they don't have an iPhone.  Both of these services are now available for Android and Blackberry platforms.   Gowalla is also available for Palm, in case anyone out there still has a Palm device.]