Check In, Get Acquired, Check Out. Farewell Gowalla
With the benefit of hindsight, it was probably inevitable but 5 years after the location based, check in social network we know as Gowalla launched and 3 months after they were acquired by Facebook, Gowalla is no more.
Despite launching in 2007, 2 years prior to Foursquare, Gowalla never seemed to be able to capture attention from either users or from the media in quite the same way as Foursquare. The similarities were many; both social networks used location as a key facet, allowed users to check in to locations they were at or near and to share those locations with other users and other social networks. But while Foursquare's game mechanics of badges and Mayors seemed to hit the right note with users, Gowalla's ill explained and ever morphing system of virtual items, spots and trips never seemed to make sense. No-one I've ever spoken to could explain exactly what the point of Gowalla was, whilst Foursquare's mechanics were simplistic and easy to grasp.
After loosing ground to Foursquare, Gowalla tried to act less as a sole source of checkins and more as a central aggregator of the disparate checkins from itself, Foursquare, Facebook and Twitter, amongst others, but this move did little to slow Foursquare's ascendancy.
