Olivier Lacan { thoughts }

Call me a Google whore, but I just noticed some­one who found my pre­vi­ous post about Gowalla using the key­words “gowalla” and “begin­ner” and that gave me a great idea for a lit­tle Gowalla primer. I’ve seen quite a few peo­ple moan about the lack of doc­u­men­ta­tion on Gowalla’s web­site or any­where else for that mat­ter. I don’t think this is the most cru­cial thing for the Alam­ofire team to develop at this point. Bet­ter yet I think that like Twit­ter, they should (and might) expect the Gowalla com­mu­nity to cre­ate tools and infor­ma­tion for and about itself. The Street Team Elite is a good exam­ple of that, and hav­ing been a mem­ber of said STE for a day I’m already impressed at how well orga­nized it is.

So let’s cut to the chase, here’s a quick run­down of Gowalla for beginners.

First Steps

Go to gowalla.com and click on the big red but­ton that invites you to “Join Gowalla”.

So far so good, now behold a beau­ti­ful lit­tle sign up form. Not as suc­cint as Tumblr’s but quite quick to fill as well. You’re going to need to fill in your first and last name (which can be edited later on if your para­noid or afraid of stalk­ers). I sug­gest putting in your real name, we’re past the whole nickname/pseudonym craze of the early noughties, but some may have objec­tions. Your user­name, as you can see, will be used to pro­vide a short address to your Gowalla pro­file, so it’s not a login and will there­fore be vis­i­ble. Most of the Gowalla team chose very short initial-type user­name (jg for John Galt) which is obvi­ously not going to leave a lot of spots for future users to imi­tate. I’m a pro­po­nent of the fullname-lowercased-nospace school (john­galt for John Galt).

Be aware that while Gowalla allows you to change your user­name after sign­ing up for the moment, it isn’t rec­om­mended and may become dif­fi­cult or impos­si­ble in the near future since the most com­mon user­names won’t be avail­able any­more. So if you missed out on the early days of twit­ter and want to make up for it by get­ting a super short user­name, go nuts! After that it’s email time, this will be used as your login and you will be sent a con­fir­ma­tion email to that address.

In Octo­ber when I joined, the email didn’t con­tain any con­fir­ma­tion link to ensure that the email address is indeed yours. I hope this changes in the future, since user­name squat­ting might become an issue if Gowalla gets a broader audi­ence. And finally for the pass­word you will be asked to enter 6 char­ac­ters or more and to “be tricky!”. I’m sure you can han­dle that.

I don’t remem­ber what hap­pens after this step on the web­site itself. But most likely you will be auto­mat­i­cally logged in to your new account and should see a page not dis­sim­i­lar to this.

Pass­port

Of course all the coun­ters should indi­cate 0 instead of what you see on my pro­file. But that’s OK, you’ll have plenty of time to go explore and catch up on me. Let’s break down this view. First you see that there are 4 dif­fer­ent tabs in the main nav­i­ga­tion (called a card stack by us web folk). Pass­port is the name of your pro­file page, you will be auto­mat­i­cally redi­rected to this page instead of the usual Gowalla home page if you are signed in to your account. Next there is Spots, Trips and Friends. We’ll talk about these pages later. Let’s con­cen­trate on Pass­port for now.

Instead of a pic­ture of my mug, on the top left side you will see a default avatar with long hair (inter­est­ing choice). A trip down to the set­tings page (top right cor­ner) will allow you to change that. But let’s con­tinue. Next to your face, your user­name is dis­played. After that the num­ber of Stamps you have. Stamps are sim­ply all the places you’ve been to.

Stamps

Since Gowalla is played using a cell­phone (for now only the iPhone), that means that the stamps will rep­re­sent all the places you phys­i­cally went to, whipped out your fancy phone, opened the Gowalla appli­ca­tion and tapped on “Check In” for the Spot you were at. A Spot was either cre­ated by you, some­one else play­ing Gowalla, or some­one from the Gowalla team in Austin, Texas. And every time you check in to one of the var­i­ous Spots around the world, your “pass­port” gets “stamped” with a pretty lit­tle icon like those yummy chicken wings that rep­re­sent KFC on the pic­ture above. And all those places you’ve been to will be logged on your Gowalla pass­port as long as your remem­ber to “check-in” with your

cell­phone. It’s not auto­matic, and you under­stand per­fectly well that this is a good thing.

Gowalla isn’t a spy in your pocket, it’s sim­ply a way for you to track where you’ve been or share this infor­ma­tion with your friends or the world. Yes it’s triv­ial, as much as trav­el­ing and going out is triv­ial. If you click on this Stamp counter you will be taken to a sub-page (see on the right) that lists all the stamps from every Spot you’ve ever vis­ited. You’ll also be able to see which of those were fea­tured spots, and States. So far inter­na­tional coun­tries have not been added although it has been hinted as a pos­si­ble future fea­ture, obvi­ously eagerly awaited.

Pins

Pins come next, and they are — as you’d expect — rewards that you earn under cer­tain spe­cific con­di­tions. When you log in to your Gowalla Pass­port for the first time you will already have a Pin. The “I Installed Gowalla!” one which is awarded by default. Oddly, you can only access details about Pins on the iPhone Gowalla app by gow­ing to the Trips tab. Why are Pins mixed with Trips on the iPhone, I’m stumped. I wish this fea­ture was acces­si­ble on the web­site and cor­rectly sorted on the iPhone app. Still this gives us a lot of use­ful information.

List of Gowalla Pins

• I Installed Gowalla! — 0 (81596 peo­ple so far)
• Wan­derer — check in at 5 dif­fer­ent spots
• Sight­seer — check in at 10 dif­fer­ent spots
• Ranger — check in at 25 dif­fer­ent spots
• Dis­cov­erer — check in at 50 dif­fer­ent spots
• Explorer — check in at 100 dif­fer­ent spots
• Way­farer — check in at 250 dif­fer­ent spots
• Voy­ager — check in at 500 dif­fer­ent spots
• Epic Voy­ager - check in at 1000 dif­fer­ent spots
• Com­mis­sioned 10 Spots
• Com­mis­sioned 25 spots
• Com­mis­sioned 50 spots
• Com­mis­sioned 100 spots
• Founded 10 Spots
• Founded 25 spots
• Founded 50 spots
• Founded 100 spots
• Visit 10 coffeeshops
• Code Mon­key — check in at 5 tech­nol­ogy startups
• Engi­neer — check in at 10 tech­nol­ogy startups
• Hacker — check in at 25 tech­nol­ogy startups
• The CTO — check in at 50 tech­nol­ogy startups

A new “Get Out with Incase!” Pin was added today after the release of a new Incase iPhone Sleeve item. The offi­cial Gowalla blog explains that there will in fact be six Incase items added to Gowalla and if all those items are col­lected, this Pin will be awarded. Bet­ter yet, some lucky users will win actual Incase prod­ucts when they col­lect the vir­tual Gowalla items in the game at select Apple Stores around the world. This is sim­i­lar to a first exper­i­ment dur­ing the Decem­ber 2009 called “The 10 and a Half Days of Christ­mas” dur­ing which the Alam­ofire team hid 600 vir­tual gifts con­tain­ing real-world Gowalla-branded iPod Nanos, T-Shirts and iTunes cards.

Items

So what are these Items I keep men­tion­ing? Well every time you check in at an exist­ing spot or one you just cre­ated, there is a seem­ingly ran­dom chance that you might receive an item cor­re­spond­ing to the type of Spot you are check­ing into (Tacos for Taco Bell, Cof­fee cups at Star­bucks, or a Bookreader at Barnes & Noble). On your phone, you can only hold 10 items at any given time. As the The Unwrit­ten Man­ual tells us “Each item is seri­al­ized and they are lim­ited in issue. As to how lim­ited, time will tell.” You can see the ser­ial num­ber of each item under its name.

What hap­pens when you’ve got 10 items and you want more? Two options.

You can drop an item at a Spot and if you do you will become a Founder of this Spot. This may allow you to obtain one of the Pins listed ear­lier. But it also has two effects on the game. “This helps us deter­mine which spots are highly traf­ficked, and ulti­mately, which spots we should fea­ture. Spot founders will receive recog­ni­tion for their sac­ri­fice in the future.” says Gowalla co-creator Josh Williams on the afore­men­tioned blog post.

Or you can vault any item in your pack. This means that you per­ma­nently remove the item from the game and add it to a per­sonal col­lec­tion. To date there are 93 unique items in Gowalla with more added reg­u­larly. But so far, there doesn’t seem to be a reward (Pin) when you col­lect all of them. On the lat­est ver­sion of the iPhone app, it is now pos­si­ble to vault an item. But it’s not pos­si­ble to see the con­tent of one’s vault except from the gowalla.com web­site. Which may cause a prob­lem if one acci­den­tally vaults two or more of the same item (which sadly is pos­si­ble with­out any warn­ing from the app) since it is impos­si­ble to remove an item from the Vault. Once Vaulted, gone forever.

That’s about it for now. This post will be updated to include infor­ma­tion about Set­tings and oth­ers sec­tions later on.

TAGS

• gowalla
• passport
• pins
• spots
• stamps
• vault

Posted on Wednesday, January 6th, 2010 at 5:34 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.