Olivier Lacan { thoughts }

I joined Gowalla on Octo­ber 8th 2009. While not really being an early adopter, there didn’t seem to be much global excite­ment about it when I joined. I think the first time I heard about it was through Jef­frey Zeld­man’s twit­ter updates. They were odd, sim­ply men­tion­ing a fact and always had a short url like this one http://gowal.la/s/7v4. I clicked on a few and was puz­zled by what I saw. Instead of an ugly twit­ter image host­ing ser­vice or sim­ply a link to a ran­dom web­page, there was a map, a list of names, cre­ators, founders, a pretty icon and a deli­ciously slick XHTML and CSS3 web­site with sub­tle tones and an unusu­ally sophis­ti­cated design.

As a silly web designer I high­lighted some of the text with my mouse to check if the text shad­ow­ing was code or graph­ics. It wasn’t graph­ics: “oooh nice!”. Then I looked around, there wasn’t much expla­na­tion about what was going on. One short video on the home page explained the con­cept. You go some­where, you check in to a “spot”, if it doesn’t exist, you sim­ply cre­ate it. That’s it? What’s the point? It was left for me to fig­ure it out. A few @Zeldman tweets later, I kept click­ing on the links and I fig­ure out (organ­i­cally) that the check-ins were counted, or rather “stamped”. And for some rea­son, Zeld­man had earned some “Pins”. Things like “Vis­ited 10 cof­feeshops” or “Ranger”. Again, no expla­na­tions. But again, inter­est­ing mys­ter­ies. After a dozen Zeld­man nods I finally fig­ured I could sign up and maybe elu­ci­date the mys­tery. And to give credit to the appeal to author­ity, man­ag­ing to turn a father of web stan­dards into an addict made me want to under­stand who these guys from Austin, Texas were and how they did it.

Clearly they weren’t strangers to the web design world, there are nods to the best and bright­est of the field all around Gowalla, from Pins (Airbag Indus­tries, Design­ing with Web Stan­dards, Jim Coudal’s Field Notes) to spe­cial spots with rare cus­tom icons like the Happy Cog HQ. Throw in a Mint leaf and it would be perfect.

Gowalla shares a com­mon issue for begin­ners with Twit­ter. It’s hard if you don’t use it heav­ily to grasp at first how good or even how use­ful it is. Twit­ter is use­less with­out inter­est­ing and ver­bose peo­ple to fol­low or fol­low­ers to dis­cuss ideas and points of view with. Gowalla seems point­less before the game dynam­ics are under­stood (they aren’t explained) and before the social map­ping aspect sinks in. Gowalla isn’t a map, it’s a note­book wait­ing for you to explore and fill it with what you see. Which is explained very suc­cinctly by the slo­gan “Go out. Go dis­cover. Go share. Gowalla.”.

There is a lot of free­dom involved. Some peo­ple will want to map every­thing they see to gain Stamps and obtain Pins faster. Oth­ers will only cre­ate or check-in at the places they really like, to make the expe­ri­ence more per­sonal. The for­mer will not cre­ate a lot of edi­to­r­ial value, but they will cre­ate map­ping value. Since Gowalla uses Google Maps, it can over­lay its data­base on top of it and dis­play innu­mer­able (300,000 so far) user-generated Spots few of which prob­a­bly already existed in Google’s data­base. Because even if busi­nesses have a clear advan­tage if they are listed on Google Maps, most of them don’t know it or sim­ply don’t care. Gowalla gets rid of this infor­ma­tion input bot­tle­neck by shift­ing the incen­tive to map busi­nesses on the client him­self. If it sounds hard to con­ceive, it shows you how bril­liant it is.

Google tried to do this by mak­ing Image tag­ging “fun” on Google Images so that peo­ple would iden­tify objects and traits in ran­domly shown pho­tographs so that they would become search­able items. Alam­ofire (the cre­ators of Gowalla) suceeeded because they focused on the game. I’m not even sure they ever con­sid­ered how pow­er­ful the game could become for crowd map­ping. If they did, con­grat­u­la­tions to them for man­ag­ing to focus on the essen­tial fun and not the long term busi­ness goal. Because as it’s been obvi­ous to me after the first few weeks of use, and was hope­fully obvi­ous also to the peo­ple who invested 8.5 mil­lion dol­lars in it Gowalla early Decem­ber, the “game” could become very lucra­tive if its soon-to-be immense and individual-powered map of the world was mon­e­tized somehow.

But let’s not for­get about the fun side of things. Alam­ofire is appar­ently a small com­pany. Like Twit­ter it doesn’t seem to be run by com­mit­tee. Instead the guys from Austin grad­u­ally try to make their game bet­ter and acces­si­ble to more mobile users on dif­fer­ent plat­forms. Gowalla is so far only avail­able on the iPhone. It’s not yet avail­able with native apps on the Palm Pré or the var­i­ous Android phones out there. Icons and items are added drop by drop. There doesn’t seem to be a sys­tem­atic approach, it’s sim­ply based on whim or cur­rent events. That may sound care­less for a com­pany that now has a lot of money vested in its even­tual prof­itabil­ity, but this is pre­cisely how you can keep the fire burn­ing for cre­ative peo­ple. And Gowalla is based on them, made for and by them.

One of the unde­vel­oped core fea­tures of Gowalla is Trips. You can obtain badges by com­plet­ing cer­tain require­ments (found­ing 50 spots for instance) but Trips can only be unlocked by check­ing in a spe­cific Fea­tured Spots. These spots have been either cre­ated or edited by the Gowalla team because they are deemed spe­cial in a cer­tain way and also receive a nicely designed cus­tom badge to make them stand out from the rest. Trips are sim­ply sets of fea­tured spots, and if you man­age to check-in at all of the spots in a Cen­tral Park trip for instance, you unlock a spe­cial Badge which can­not be unlocked any other way. Of course these trips require a lot more top-down inter­ven­tion from the Alam­ofire team. But in an email to Gowallers, Josh Williams the co-creator (with Scott Ray­mond) of Gowalla announced that 2010 will see the release of trip cre­ation tools for the com­mu­nity. Another step towards increas­ing user addic­tion, and a very excit­ing perspective.

While Face­book was born on the PC, Twit­ter through SMS, Gowalla is one of the first suc­cess­ful web appli­ca­tion which solely relies on Mobile com­put­ing and geolo­ca­tion. And to fol­low the voices of many, I see a very bright future for Gowalla in 2010.

TAGS

• alamofire
• geolocation
• gowalla
• gps
• ideas
• iphone
• twitter
• zeldman

Posted on Tuesday, January 5th, 2010 at 3:27 am. Filed under Neurons. Follow responses to this entry with the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.