Gowalla for iPhone 1.4

This release was dubbed minor by the Gowalla team but there were some very interesting — if subtle — modifications included. First there was an obvious nod to the beautiful “slide and release” refresh system Loren Brichter’s Tweetie 2 uses. Previously you had to go back up one level and back to refresh a list of spots for instance, which was really inefficient. Now if you slide downward when at the top of the Spot list, the interface will follow your finger and a the Gowalla kangaroo will pop out to signal a refresh. If you slide back down, nothing happens. If you instead release upon seing the kangaroo, a refresh is launched to display a more up-to-date list. Anyone who whined about the iPad being just a bigger iPod Touch (is that supposed to be a bad thing?) this week won’t notice or care, the rest of us will see it as the crucial experience improvement that it is.

Drive-By Gowalling

In an upcoming post I will discuss more in-depth the two major game dynamics one can decide to adopt towards Gowalla, but in this 1.4 update a clear step was taken to limit the excesses of one of them.

The Scavenger Hunting aspect of Gowalla is a very satisfying but unsustainable way to play the game. It basically implies you will try to checkin (and maybe found) as many spots as you can not because you actually went — and stayed — somewhere, but because you want to accumulate items in the hopes of finding spots with rare item. You can either receive rare items at certain spots (upon checkin) or swap an exiting item in your pack with a rare item that was previously dropped (by a founder) or swapped by a visitor.

Previously, this way of playing was made easier by the fact that as soon as you checked in somewhere you would be prompted to drop an item to become a founder and would be able to see directly what items were currently at this location.

1.4 changed that and now you are taken to the Spot Details tab instead of the Spot Items tab. And to see a spot’s items and eventually drop an item to become a founder, you now have to take an additional step by tapping the Items tab.

This may seem very subtle, but it suddenly makes it a little more tedious, time and attention-consuming to swap items and found a spot. Which might be good news for the people who worried about hordes of Gowalling drivers out there becoming a worse scourge than serial texters.

Challenges, Trips and Friends

The Trips interface was also refined slightly prior to 1.4 with the addition of My Trips and Friend Trips. Currently the only user-created trips you can see are those of your friends (as in people you added on Gowalla) and your own. Team Gowalla explained that depending on the popularity of these trips they will selectively (good) feature some of them as actual trips with custom Gowalla-made icons. A very nice community touch if you ask me and again a good way to use crowd-sourcing with an editorial touch.

There is another new category (I believe) in the Trips page, it’s called Challenges and used to be bundled with real trips.

Challenges are different than trip and correspond more to the Scavenger Hunt side of the game. You can unlock these with quantity-based achievements rather than checking in a specific spots. For instance you become a Wayfarer as soon as you checkin at 250 different spots. I listed these in a previous post. There are more exotic challenges (like Code Monkey and Get Out With Incase) but generally it’s an underdeveloped feature of Gowalla that could welcome some more original ideas.

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.

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.