Travis Bradshaw

It’s been a lot of fun lately experimenting with location based applications. With awesome platforms like Foursquare and Gowalla, it’s interesting to see what location aware social services are capable of.

The technology and the ideas are new enough that there are pretty significantly different takes on what makes a great location base service, and with my initial survey of the available applications I had decided that Foursquare seemed like the best fit for what I wanted out of a location based service.

What particularly drew me to Foursquare was the idea of “tips”. The premise of digital graffiti that could provide socially useful tips for strangers seemed like a very cool way to spawn emergent social interactions. But in practice, Foursquare doesn’t do a good job delivering. The “tips” functionality seems to be a completely unstructured text without definite purpose. The “mayoral” competitions are very fun, but kind of reinforce a competitive nature that isn’t really what I’m trying to get out of emergent social media. I’m hoping for new augmented social experiences that build community, not competition.

A recent dinner with Nate Dillion opened my understanding of the Gowalla platform immensely. A recent social media conference in Lawrence, KS featured an executive of Gowalla (that is a KU graduate!). It clarified that what makes Gowalla different from Foursquare is a model that doesn’t focus on competition, but instead uses the idea of collecting stamps on a passport. Where I previously misinterpreted the stamps as a form of “virtual items” like a massively multiplayer online game (offline game?), really Gowalla focuses on documenting your real world experiences in an attractive way.

Additionally, Gowalla has been adding really great features, like “trips” (pub crawl, anyone?) and “events” and other abstract “locations” that people attend. Meanwhile, Foursquare still won’t even let me help correct/merge trashy location entries.

Add to those differences a very attractive iPad app and an API that will let my friends and I develop against Gowalla as a service… and that’s pretty much a switch.

So goodbye Foursquare friends. It’s been very fun campaigning for mayor with, er, against you. But I’m looking for friendlier experiences with superior implementations.

Gowalla, here I am.