The Fall of Gowalla

The Almost Foursquare
 

Roughly half a decade ago, when the first mobile check-in apps were created, techies were satisfied with location-based services that merely allowed users to share their locations with friends. At present, a handful young entrepreneurs and veterans of the mobile check-in alike are innovating the practice to see how it can be used in a way that’s fresh and appealing to consumers, but this wasn't always the case.

Gowalla is an originator of the check-in app, which had over 300,000 users by June of 2010. The former iPhone, Android and Blackberry application used GPS to allow users to share their locations with friends. “It's a social adventure guide for people who like to go places, almost like having a passport or travel journal on your phone,” Josh Williams, the co-founder and CEO of Gowalla, describes in a January 2011 blog post.

“My fondest memories as a kid were road trips taken with my family and friends. I always found something a bit magical about packing up a car and driving someplace new,” Williams said. “This love for travel was no doubt the inspiration that fueled the creation of Gowalla.” 

Although the app may seem to be a copycat of the well-known Foursquare, Gowalla in fact predates Foursquare by over a year and a half, the former having been founded in August of 2007 and the latter in March of 2009.  However, while Foursquare has been able to maintain its presence in the app world as an innovator and champion of location-based check-in services, Gowalla has not. On December 5, 2011, the startup announced that it had been acquired by Facebook for an undisclosed sum.

In an interview with Mashable in April of 2010, a year and a half before the acquisition, Williams mused on the future of Gowalla: “We see Gowalla coming beyond just a declaration of ‘this is where I am,’ but ‘this is where I am, these are the people I was with, and these are the photographs that were taken,’” he explained. “So I can go in and pull up my buddy who checked into the Mavs and Spurs game in Dallas last night and see all the photos taken by fans there, and it becomes this snapshot of what happened in that moment.”

If only he could’ve known just how far beyond this vision mobile check-in apps would progress in a mere two-and-a-half years.

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