So long, Gowalla!

In a recent post to their blog, Gowalla announced that they are making some dramatic changes to their service.  For those of you who are not familiar with Gowalla, it is (or rather, was) a location-based check-in application available on several mobile platforms.  You could use it to find places nearby (businesses, parks, events, etc.), electronically "check in" at these locations, create new locations as needed, and optionally share your "check in" on Facebook or Twitter.  You could post photos of the location, and hold conversations with your friends about your activities, and earn "badges" for visiting a location or set of locations ("completing a trip"). 

One thing that separated Gowalla from its competitors was the inclusion of virtual items that could be found during one's travels.  You could drop these items at other locations or collect and view them in your online Gowalla account.  One of my goals with items was to find items that had lower issue/serial numbers than the ones I already had.  Another fun thing to do was to "seed" random locations with rare or desirable items for someone else to find later.  Every time I checked into my bus stop on the way to work, I knew there was a chance that I would find a Tourbus, a 3-Piece Luggage Set, or some other random item.  It was like a mini lottery complete with a mini rush of anticipation.  Well, I guess that aspect is gone now: 

...we will be removing Items completely with the next release of Gowalla. While they have been a trademark feature of Gowalla since the beginning — one that our entire team poured much effort and passion into — fewer than half a percent of our active community makes use of them. It now causes more distraction than joy for the vast majority of our community.

 Fewer than half a percent of the active community made use of them?  That reeks of a "created" statistic, but in light of how the last few updates to their application have made it progressively more difficult to access items, perhaps it is correct.  Items may have become more of a "distraction than a joy" for newcomers to the Gowalla realm, but I think the development team and programmers at Gowalla HQ made some design changes over time that made this a bit of a self-fulfilling prophecy.

I did not see the posting with which I led off this entry before happily updating to the new 4.0 version of Gowalla on my iPhone yesterday.  Upon updating, the first thing I tried doing was checking into the bus stop I used daily when I was working in downtown Seattle.  What I saw on-screen when the app loaded was not a list of nearby locations as Gowalla had always displayed, but rather a list of "featured" locations in the Seattle area.  The closest of these was the Bellevue Square shopping center, and it was 18km away.  Say what?  It was definitely an annoyance, and while I eventually figured out how to check in at nearby locations, it now involves more work and is just not fun anymore.

After my encounter with version 4.0 of Gowalla, I decided to revert back to version 3.3.  A little poking around on Google revealed that this process isn't difficult if you recover the .IPA file from your Recycle Bin before it gets emptied, and it was a good learning experience for me.

I then jumped onto Gowalla's Twitter feed to see what others were thinking about the new version of the program.  It turns out I am not alone in my confusion and disappointment.  Most people were more diplomatic about things than I was, but it was clear that there were a lot of people who were a little lost regarding the new interface.  It was then that I stumbled upon the fact that they are doing away with items altogether.  I thought I could just muddle through with the old 3.3 client, but Gowalla will be re-writing their whole programming interface soon to truly remove items.  That is when it hit me: Gowalla had ceased being interesting to me.  I had been a volunteer editor for their locations (aka, "Street Team" member), and had been enjoying (and being a bit of an evangelist for) the application for nearly two years.  Then with one blog post, one application update and one (eventual) API change...it all became moot.

So thanks for the good times, Gowalla.  It was fun while it lasted.  Had I known that you would over the course of our acquaintance systematically remove everything I found interesting about your service, I would have spent my time using some other location-based check-in program.  Hell, I would surely be the "mayor" of the Renton Transit Center by now if I had.