

Location-based apps: Flook, Gowalla, Foursquare - a review - jedc
http://blog.jedchristiansen.com/2009/12/31/location-based-apps-flook-gowalla-foursquare/

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pclark
Gowalla hasn't given me enough of a reason to keep coming back other than to
tell my friends where I am. And I'm not convinced thats valuable until all my
friends are on it, to which we'll require a Loopt infrastructure + Facebook
user dealio.

Foursquare currently only works in specific cities, but I think its shallow in
terms of why I'd keep coming back aside for the _very_ shallow game of it. Is
there value here? In the future if I get rewarded for being a mayor, and
services get rewarded for active users visiting (eg: coupons) maybe.

I think in the short time Gowalla and Foursquare will duke it out, I'm
skeptical that they'll get enough users without teaming up with a big player.
Facebook has 300M web users. Loopt has 3M mobile users. Gowalla has 50k?

The other problem with these applications is the lack of background apps. Why
do I have to manually check in to every place I go, why can't it work like
Google Lattitude on my Blackberry: it just runs and does everything for me.

A Last.FM scrobbler for location, please. (Fire-eagle?)

Flook is interesting, but entirely disconnected from Gowalla and Foursquare. A
better comparison for Flook is MobileSafari, or TwitPic, or Flickr. Flook is
about content thats around me thats cool - who created it comes second to
this. I guess there is also the element of where are my friends going that is
interesting, but I believe that is secondary to the value of being somewhere
and having interesting local hidden gems. And we all know the challenges with
this kind of "information overload vs filter failure" plays, the devil is in
the details.

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bjplink
I've been using Gowalla for about a week now and it's a neat little diversion
when you're out on the town. I like that it works in my city which is
relatively large, but not large enough to be recognized by Foursquare yet.

The downside to Gowalla is that there is a lot of cruft since anyone can
basically add a location. For example, in my neighborhood, amidst the
restaurants and stores is a location called "My Sister's" which I'm pretty
sure isn't the name of the newest diner in town...

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jedc
Thanks for reminding me that you can only use Foursquare in big cities... I
just updated the post.

There's certainly some cruft in Foursquare, too, but I agree that Gowalla
tends to be a bit worse with this.

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malbiniak
First time I've heard of Flook. Very, very interesting, but agreed that it's a
disconnect from Foursquare, Gowalla, and Brightkite.

Good points on the user base, too. According to Compete data for November,
Facebook is pulling in south of 130M unique visitors/month, and Twitter is
pulling in around 22M. By comparison, Foursquare is pulling around 368K,
Brightkite is around 228K, and Gowalla nearing 80K. Amazing what downtime in
an airport can get you ;)

There seems to be some evidence that users are willing to share their location
with micro-conversations (the reason Mashable called Foursquare the Twitter of
2010), but unlike Twitter, none of these guys have really robust APIs built
out. Hell, Gowalla still doesn't have one, and Foursquare only let's you grab
at per-user data, not per-location (beyond 3h).

I'm anxiously watching to see which network grabs the most users, and have my
fingers crossed that the winner will have a way for the ecosystem around it to
develop. Maybe it will be Twitter w/ Geo, but does that assume users will
change their behavior and start using Twitter more while mobile? (see: Twitter
usage over weekends. Most of the usage is us bored at work)

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jparise
I would have liked to have seen Brightkite included in the review, as well.

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pclark
Gowalla has raised $8.4M and has around 50K users as of December 2009.

Foursquare has raised $1.35M and has around 150K users as of December 2009.

Loopt has raised $13.3M and has around 2M users.

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pkaler
The Gowalla case is a little more complex than that. The parent company is
Alamofire and their Facebook App PackRat has about 50K users, too.
<http://alamofire.com/>

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pclark
Doubt thats the investment focus though

