Gowalla Is Reborn As A Beautiful App For Travel And Storytelling | Hacker News Reader

Gowalla Is Reborn As A Beautiful App For Travel And Storytelling

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72 pointskacy19 comments

Seeing that they probably would have never beat Foursquare, I'm glad that they are continuing to iterate. I have to say that I'm a bit skeptical about this new product. It seems a bit murky conceptually, and I'm not sure if travel is the right industry for them to be putting their bets on.

I met a lot of diehard Gowalla fans during SXSW at their party, and they seemed much more keyed into the gaming / object collection aspects of the service. Bottom line - I think a lot of these superfans (many of whom traveled on their own dime to the party) will probably feel alienated by this new app. Gowalla will probably have to find a whole new market, which may not be the worst thing but won't be the easiest either.

No matter what, I think Gowalla has a huge uphill battle to climb. They haven't even really been able to build much excitement here in Austin (even among people I know who are addicted to social media). I think their design and UI is top notch, but they seem to be missing whatever makes consumers super excited.

I was pretty sad when we had to cut the items feature (I worked sooo hard to get that space shuttle!!). But trust me, this move makes for a much more compelling and useful product.

I worked at Gowalla last summer and I can tell you that there are superusers who travel around only for the beautiful stamps and to collect items, but that number is very small. Gowalla has always been about travel and exploring. This move is not a surprise in any way.

Sorry, has check-in been "won" by Foursquare now that Gowalla and Facebook have bowed out, or is it actually the case that check-in is just dead?

Check-ins are just going for a swim in the Chasm: http://www.relativelydigital.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/12/...

I appreciate the graphic, but Foursquare is way beyond early adopters at this point. My mom has been asking me about foursquare and within a month it's going to eclipse FarmVille. http://www.google.com/trends?q=foursquare%2C+farmville&c...

But those graphs demonstrate that it'll only overtake FarmVille because FarmVille is declining. Foursquare really hasn't moved much.

I live in NYC, and know a ton of people that use Foursquare. I know people in Vancouver and London that have never heard of the thing. I assure you that they have heard of FarmVille.

From my grumpy old man perspective, Foursquare and Farmville are the top-most "noise generators" in the social stream.

Check-in has gone dormant for now because for most of the world's mobile users, there is no real benefit to checking-in to a place. The action of checking-in can be quite powerful if different systems can react to it. I'd love to check in to a fast-food drive-thru on my phone, get a meal menu customized to the particular location, place my order, pay for it, and just drive up to the window. Or check-in to a stadium/theater/museum and get a customized program guide. I don't want to download a new app for each company, location, or event. I don't want to go to their website. I should check-in to a place using a single app, and the relevant services should perform the most appropriate actions. It's not going to happen right away but eventually it will.

If you want to "check in" to a drive-thru, how is this different than say, going to chipotle.com and ordering online? Your description sounds like "an app that conglomerates all things I would do on a company website into one." Obviously what those "things" are are different from person to person - there would need to be more focus. Plus you'd have to integrate into every system you partnered with - which is significant development overhead for each new feature.

It kind of sounds like you are suggesting that each company/store/whatever conform to some generalized platform, whose APIs can be auto-discovered or auto-pruned with GPS coordinate input. This is almost along the lines of "everything should have an API - even my toaster." Theres someone out there trying that very thing but I forgot the name of it.

We've put a lot of hard work into this, I think you'll be happy with the final result :)

Nice work!

I think MG is right that "The travel aspect is potentially even bigger. While there are a lot of people going after this problem, no one has nailed the mobile travel guide so far. When someone does, it’s going to be massive."

Partnering with Disney, National Geographic, and various universities to get their guide-content is a smart move.

Who is providing good travel guides for mobile? Fodor's? Frommer's? Lonely Planet?

Lonely Planet is still my go-to for travel guides. Their content, however, is not yet crowd sourced...

surprised to not see more positive comments here. this sounds like color done right (or better, at least).

It takes time to get it right, and I think Gowalla and Foursquare are both on track to do just that. I also think Josh is a great product guy and will eventually find a working solution. I think this is great proof that they aren't just waiting for it to come to them by chance.

They were pretty much forced to pivot because they could not compete with Foursquare.

Why are they given a chance to speak at Techcrunch Disrupt? Come'n they had their moment in the sun, give some new startups a chance

Why are they given a chance to speak at Techcrunch Disrupt? Come'n they had their moment in the sun, give some new startups a chance

What, because startups should be given one chance and one chance only?

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