Okay Geek Farm
Gowalla now supports Facebook Places and Foursquare
Brandon Davenport
It looks like Gowalla has taken a major shift in direction, and has added support for Facebook Places and Foursquare along with a new App that sports a great new design by Tim Van Damme, and a new (not so obvious) outlook on their service.
“Today you can now connect both your Facebook and Foursquare accounts in order to keep up with friends across multiple services. We’ve combined them all into a single, connected activity feed with all your friends, regardless of the service they checked in on.” — Gowalla
Obviously, Gowalla has become the little guy in the location services war, and instead of fighting itself into failure, it has decided to become a new kind of beast that will change the location services game forever.
When you think of Gowalla, you think of a location service that is just like every other service you already use — you check in, see where your friends are, take trips and earn stickers and badges. Most of the people I know use Gowalla, Foursquare and Facebook Places, and I can just imagine the frustration of having to use 3 different apps - grinding away at their patience throughout the day.
Why Gowalla 3 is potentially game-changing
Like I mentioned above, having to use 3 different apps is a pain, and using a janky “middle man” app can be tedious, as support is limited and the developer’s main focus isn’t location — they probably have 30 other projects on the go.
Gowalla on the other hand deals with location services exclusively, and they make sure everything is working all the time. In my mind, having Gowalla as the “middle-man” for my location services makes sense. Gowalla is known for their great design, quality apps and their service is usually pretty solid.
Here is where it get’s interesting — Gowalla isn’t just providing a location service anymore, they’re now providing the app for every other service — including their own, so in a way, they have the upper hand. I mean, who wouldn’t download Gowalla 3? Even if you don’t even use Gowalla, it’s one of the better location apps in the app store.
In the end, Gowalla has flipped the location service war on it’s head, and has taken the next step where it’s no longer just the Gowalla app, but an app for everyone, and a way to pull more users into their world, and maybe “Gowalla-fy” them in the process — lets just hope this goes smoothly!
