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Comment by cageface | Hacker News Reader

It's interesting that Foursquare sees Scala and Lift as a critical technical advantage but Gowalla seems to be competing just fine with their Rails stack.

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You might want to back up "competing just fine" with something.

Numbers on Compete (http://siteanalytics.compete.com/foursquare.com+gowalla.com/) suggest that Foursquare is pushing quite a bit more traffic than Gowalla, at least on the web. Most reports suggest that Foursquare is also beating out Gowalla in terms of users.

(Full disclosure: I have friends at Foursquare, Gowalla, and on the Lift project. I don't really care about any one of them "winning", I just like facts.)

I guess I was speaking more anecdotally, in terms of both sites providing roughly equivalent functionality and supporting non-trivial load. Thanks for the analytics link though. I didn't realize the traffic disparity was that high.

Both are still pretty small (I haven't even heard of Gowalla), so it seems too early to make any judgments yet. The critical technical advantage, if it exists, will probably make itself really known once they grow a couple of orders of magnitude.

I make no judgements. I'm a big fan of Scala, in fact. It's just not clear to me to what extent Foursquare is a validation of Lift.

These slides go into a little more detail on Foursquare's switch to Lift: https://docs.google.com/present/view?id=0ATHAG0M-0vxXZGNicHo...

Foursquare switched to Lift at the end of 2009. You can see the traffic growth patterns for both foursquare.com and gowalla.com here:

http://siteanalytics.compete.com/foursquare.com+gowalla.com/...

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