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.

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.