Thoughts on Geolocation Apps (Gowalla & Foursquare)

Probably one of the hottest things going right now in the mobile / social / wireless community has to be Geolocation applications like Gowalla, Foursquare, Brightkite, and Loopt.  I am sure that there are several other applications on the market that I don’t know about but for the most part the two leaders of the pack right now are Gowalla and Foursquare.

Both Gowalla and Foursquare debuted at South by Southwest Interactive Festival this past year and have picked up a lot of momentum since then.  I first started using Loopt on my iPhone but quickly downloaded Foursquare and Gowalla after seeing a lot of my friends become early adopters of these applications. 

Of course both of these applications integrate w/ Twitter and Facebook just like you would expect them to, but instead of seeing these applications as “services” or “tools” a lot of the bloggers I read have labeled them “games”, and this just doesn’t resonate with me.  I suppose I can see where they are coming from, both applications are somewhat unique. 

Foursquare allows it’s users to become Mayors of a particular location, and they can oust their friends or co-workers anytime based on their number of check-ins. 

Gowalla, which is my favorite of the two applications, takes a little bit different approach in that it is more like a scavenger hunt.  One of the things that I like the most about Gowalla is that it is crowdsourced.  Gowalla users can pick up various items at random when they check in at new locations, these items can consist of anything such as Guitar Amps, Skull Caps, Belt Buckles, or Longhorn Cattle (like I picked up today while getting my haircut).  These items can be dropped at new locations that the user adds so that they can become the founders of that particular location.  Granted, I know that this sounds a lot like a game, and for the most part in it’s infant stage right now, it probably is, but the opportunities for location based social media tools like Gowalla for businesses are endless.

Both Gowalla (@gowalla) and Foursquare (@foursquare) both have an intense presence on Twitter, both of whom have responded to questions I have had in just a few minutes.  Last week I mentioned that both of these companies should work w/ businesses to build promotions, etc. and they both responded that they were already doing this.  One of my friends on Twitter also notified me that they are already in talks w/ Foursquare about enhancing their Geo-presence.

In closing, my favorite of these two applications is still Gowalla, although I occasionally use Foursquare just to keep things balanced out.  I think that there is definitely room in the marketplace for at least two geo-service providers / applications, if not more down the road, but for the time being I am giving Gowalla my nod.  One other thing that is worth noting about Gowalla is that in December of last year, Alamofire, the company that released Gowalla received almost 9 million dollars in funding from investors. I know that there are some people out there that will disagree with me and prefer Foursquare, in fact some of my friends are power users and are the mayors of multiple locations.  I would love to hear from someone who prefers Foursquare as to why it’s their favorite app right now.

One area of improvement that I think Gowalla can make, and it’s probably already in the works, is that there is no real connection between Gowalla friends and Twitter friends that I can tell.  For example, I recently had a neighbor (that I previously did not know) check in at my home on Gowalla.  I didn’t know this person at all.  I was interested as to who they were so I added them as a friend on Gowalla, okay, so we are now Gowalla friends.  Well, to add that person as a friend on Twitter required an additional step for me in looking them up and adding them.  I think that this should be a “given” at some point in the future, and I am not for sure why this isn’t already a core feature of the application, could be its coming out very soon.

If you are a Foursquare user and prefer that service over Gowalla, be sure to drop me a comment and enlighten me as to why that is.  I would love to hear from you.