A New Gowalla | Hacker News Reader

A New Gowalla

blog.gowalla.com

I have to applaud Gowalla for taking the risk of changing directions with their platform. Although it is a step away from the check-in crowd, their move is in the direction of how I tend to use Gowalla or Foursquare.

If you live outside of urban areas like most people checking in at the same places over and over looses its appeal quickly. The only time I actively use any check-in service is when I'm traveling or at a conference. I'm sure they'll continue to find their way in the new direction, but I like where they're heading.

Stellar design too.

I find the new app much more interesting and useful than the old one. I can now create a "story" for a location and indicate who I'm there with, share pictures together, etc. The other thing I like is the new "highlights" tagging feature where you can tag locations with various indicators like: watering hole, or GTD, or "Sketchy" to give folks indicators of what's nice (or not so nice) at a location.

> We’re building a social atlas for the world. And we need your help to do it.

This makes me think of Dopplr. As somebody who was using Gowalla purely for the check-in-to-see-where-I've-been aspect, I think I'm going to end up a Foursquare user before long. I guess you have to do what you have to do in order to stay alive and hopefully end up profitable.

I like the snazzy pull-to-refresh animation in their new iPhone app!

Interesting to see their take on mobile+social+local travel guides, but Yelp reviews give me a lot more opinionated information than Gowalla checkins. Not sure if their new stories are supposed to be reviews.

I've never used Gowalla, but I've seen a lot of complaints on Twitter that peoples' "stuff" has disappeared. What's happened there?

I assume that means the "items" you used to pick up at various locations. They've killed off that whole concept, which used to be novel, but new people probably wondered what was up with getting a "Baseball bat" when you check-in somewhere.

IIRC Josh Williams said that only a small small percentage of people actually used them.

Which is not necessarily true...

It is completely true, less than 1 percent of all users were the users who were actively using/dropping/collecting items.

They got less traction than FourSquare, and are now pivoting to a less profitable space in travel guides... their apps look nice, and they got a good looking logo, I guess... but this sounds like an app in search of a problem. Gowalla looks more like a social experiment, or a fun project than an actual company right now.

Ironically though, Gowalla's new data may likely appeal to advertisers more than ever before. Each interaction is now within a very defined context -- travel and tourism. There's no need to try to filter out locals vs. tourists with this. Companies will know exactly who is using Gowalla and why. These predefined areas will be a huge leg up in negotiations with companies.

Actually, you're also off on travel being less profitable. In fact, global travel and tourism is one of the largest markets on the planet, with $919 Bil in expenditures last year[0]. It's also astoundingly broad -- nearly every country on the planet, big or small, poor or rich, has a significant tourism economy. This is the big cash cow that Gowalla's chasing.

[0]http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tourism

My main issue with adopting Gowalla was that they never let me actually use it.

Their Facebook Connect was broken for months—it'd bring you to a text error page; their app crashed repeatedly (and apparently is still doing so on the 3GS with their new update.)

Very frustrating user experience.

Less profitable space? Is check-ins profitable at all?

More narrow sounds more like it :)

Yes, FourSquare has done a pretty good job at monetizing (Sponsored badges, integration with AmEx, etc...) I'm not sure whether they are profitable per say but they seem to have a pretty good road to it if not.

Well, it is a pivot, I'll give them that. And as always their design is superior but if they insist on listing locales like "Cheers" in Boston as a destination in their guide, they're going to find themselves pivoting to something else in the near future.

My understanding is the Guides are essentially auto-generated by bubbling up top check-in places. Cheers, while corny, is definitely one of those places most tourists go to see when in Boston.

I have to say that I'd really like to see the data on that. This looks like an unpersonalized kitchen sink attempt to cover everything. You can buy/rent/scrape all the locations, with geo data, from a variety of resources.

You can pull the most check-in places from their API if you want to see it yourself. Just looking at the Pittsburgh guide, it seems like the basic tourist tour we give visitors, and it doesn't surprise me these are also the most checked in places. They also have a few local bars that are not quite so touristy but definitely popular with the smart phone crowd.

In another comment of yours you mentioned appealing to the lowest common denominator... I see what you are saying but that also means "the average" person. You are less likely to be wrong suggesting the Cheers bar then a local favorite.

But I'm not the average person and my time is better spent visiting things of value, to me, in a foreign city. It doesn't make me any better of a person to visit Navy Pier, Pier 39, Pier One, Anthony's Pier Four or Piers Morgan just because a large dataset of anonymous people checked in there. And I don't need an app to tell me how great those places are. They hand these guides out at airports, hotels, free newspapers, paid newspapers and the internet.

tl;dr: Gowalla wishes they got some of that Where money. I just searched for "marijuana" in Amsterdam and it returned two results. One was the Hemp Museum. You're better off asking a surly local or a fellow tourist.

It may not appeal to everyone, but I've personally never met someone not interested in visiting the cheers bar.

Travel guides are inherently for tourists looking to see these little kitschy places.

I'm sorry, but people from Boston don't go to Cheers and you're assuming that tourists are really looking to visit these traps because of the plethora of mentions these places receive in poorly conceived travel guides. In this case, Gowalla, just like every other travel app is going for the low-hanging fruit and pandering to the lowest common denominator. Yes, there is money in it, but like it's been mentioned before, this may be an app in search of a problem to solve but it just may very well be that there isn't much beyond Cheers that appeals to a certain demographic and their use case is very well served.

I would definitely want to visit Cheers if I visited Boston, it was a part of my childhood. I think you're totally underestimating the value of the place.

There a phonebox near my house that's pretty run down, cleaned once a year, smells of pee and often has those seedy cards in it. It's not well maintained.

But it's constantly being photographed by tourists. Every time I walk past it there's someone taking a picture.

Why? Because it's one of those classic red booths and you can spot it if you're visiting Nottingham Castle.

Tourists can love stuff that looks mundane to the locals.

Please visit Cheers London and report back on the cultural value it micturates upon that fair city.

To agree, I want to point out this snippet;

The conversation then turned to strange things [Neil Gaiman] has witnessed while in the US: a large decommissioned nuclear submarine docked by a road in Portsmouth, NH that locals barely take notice of; cheese-wheel rolling festivals; and people parking their vehicles on frozen lakes in the American heartland. He noted that, “The UK is weird, but not as weird as here!”

http://www.comicbooked.com/neil-gaiman-american-gods-anniver...

You're right. My sister lived on Northwest St. up in Portsmouth for a number of years. I'd visit about 3 or 4 times a year. Never once visited the Albacore. I just have no interest in subs. But I'm sure Peter's Palace around the corner saw many visitors.

Have to agree.. Tokyo is not showing me the most inspiring list of destinations. I'd like an app has these kinds of lists, weighted by how long someone has lived in a city.. I can't help but feel there's a low hanging fruit there for "off the beaten path" travel guides. Simply ranking by number of check-ins is not so novel..

I'm applying to YC this round with an idea very similar to this. We're aiming to help locals make travel guides for their own cities.

What other things frustrate you about finding things to do in a foreign city?

Urbandig?

Oh, that's an interesting app. I didn't find that while looking for companies that do this already.

Our solution is a bit different - namely avoiding curation by a few people. We're frustrated by how difficult it is to find things to do in a new city, and we want to get locals to help (after all, the best way to visit a city is to visit a friend who lives in that city). Think crowdsourced walking tours.

Yes, I've looked into that. Much better than the standard walking tours with a (mis)guide dressed up in pre-Industrial garb. It's a very interesting concept for those interested in trying something new, but maybe hard to get over the fear-factor for the average tourist, who mind you, won't hesitate to fork over $32 for a tour in an aging water bus.

Can I ask what you found out when looking into it? Did you consider doing something in this space and decide against it?

We can take this discussion off HN, too. My email is in my profile.

Looks good. As with everything social, the next step is going to be heavy curation and determining who's curation to trust. Will be keeping an eye on it if it ever makes it to my neck of the woods..

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