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.