Reviews

I’ve been doing some “hardcore” testing of the Gowalla service today. And i have to say that i am pretty amazed.

Gowalla provides a new way to explore your neighborhood and the world, share your travels with your friends, and collect souvenirs that reflect your personal path. -Gowalla Inc.

The Gowalla service uses the GPS on your mobile to find out where you are in the world and gives you the opportunity to share this with your friends on Facebook or Twitter. Or if you discover a new spot you may simply add it to the service. Another great and usefull part of Gowalla is the “Nearby spots” service, which will find any coffeeshop, museum or whatever spots users have added within a couple of hundred meters from your standing.

I’ve allready started to love Gowalla and it’s easy interface, but I’m not sure this is going to be “the-biggest-trendiest-internet-thing” in 2010. For that it’s to dependent of other social platforms like Facebook and Twitter, and the best part of the service is only available on a mobile with GPS. And the last point here reduces the potential user reach dramaticly since far from every mobilephone sold has GPS.

Another thing that I noticed when testing Gowalla is that I don’t see any clear business model? How are they going to make money to survive? Are they yet another social media service without any clear plan for how they are going to make money? But I see some really valuable data in Gowalla; Travelling and movement data of thousands of users.