Exciting Enhancements for Gowalla

It’s not a big secret that I am a Gowalla fan-boy, have been for a long time now. I see the value of geosocial as an industry insider and a business owner, companies like Gowalla and Foursquare have been leading this charge along with Facebook, who recently announced they were dropping their emphasis on Places, or at least take it in another direction.

I have known for a while now that Gowalla was going to make this huge announcement but in my mind I don’t think I realized their vision would be this awesome. While Gowalla is going to remain one of the top check-in services out there, they are also going to expand the app to include two other awesome areas that are pretty much no-brainers in this day of social networking, storytelling and travel. Today, Josh Williams unveiled the new Gowalla 4.0 app at TechCrunch Disrupt.  Here are some comments from the TechCrunch website as to what you can expect to see in version 4.0:

Technically version 4.0, the new version bears little resemblance to the previous versions of the app. Gowalla is no longer predominantly a check-in service. That’s still one aspect of it, but the idea is now to focus on two key areas: travel and storytelling.

When you load up Gowalla, the first thing you see is still a main activity feed. Here you’ll find the activity from your friends. Because Gowalla isn’t completely pivoting away from their core location functionality, much of the data and social connections remain intact. But instead of a stream of check-ins, you’ll notice people hanging out together. They’re checking-in, but they’re also taking pictures and talking to one another in clusters that are known as “Stories”.

The main middle tab is now “Guides”. Here you’ll find curated travel guides for various places around the world. For example, if you load up the app in San Francisco, you’ll see the San Francisco guide, as well as the East Bay guide and the Stanford guide. You can quickly scroll through other guides not near you as well. And Gowalla has the ability to make special guides on the fly. For example, they made a TC Disrupt guide for event-goers.

Clicking on these guides loads up a bit of information about the city as well as all of the must-see spots. Again, because Gowalla has years worth of location data, they’re able to easily populate robust guides. Some of the locations are curated, some are based on check-in data and people favoriting places. The Gowalla “Highlights” feature also plays a role here.

The final tab is your personal profile area. Here you’ll find all of your pictures and all of your Stories.

There are several stories online regarding the Gowalla announcement, here’s a link to another good one. One other thing that I think is important to note, the state of Arkansas is a launch partner w/ Gowalla for this app.  Awesome!!!

I haven’t been this excited about an app release like this in a long time. I bet we do a podcast really soon on this…