Gowalla

Gowalla Review

by on April 13, 2011

Gowalla manages to get round the tricky fact that you have to create an account before you can use the app with ease. This is because it calls the sign-in page a ‘passport’. ‘A passport to what?’ we thought, while creating our account. Riches? Magic? The answer to life, the universe and everything? Not exactly, but you do get to use a fairly competent app to chart your travels.

Like Facebook Places and Foursquare, Gowalla is essentially an app where you check-in to places and check out what your friends are doing at that time as well. Now, there are obvious privacy implications with this, but it seems with Facebook on board with Places, more people are savvy to the idea that telling everyone where you are at any given moment is a good thing.

Alongside the ability to check in, you can also check out spots around where you are at that moment, by clicking on the Nearby Spots icon.

It’s pretty good at telling you where these things are in relative to you (7.2km north etc) but there’s no way to search for things by category, so your nearest Kwik Fit will rub shoulders with a pub and so on.

Click on these and you will see other Gowalla users who have checked into these places. And if there isn’t a place on there that you want to check into, then you can create your own spot.

One of the neat things about Gowalla is that uou can click on the Trip icon and it will give you ideas of what to do near-ish where you are. These have been created by other users. We clicked on a London Pub Crawl (created by Jo Carter) and got 10 pubs listed to go to.

Without friends, Gowalla is a bit of a lonely place, but when you start connecting with other like-minded savvy people, it’s an intuitive and great-to-use app. And given that it also links in with Facebook and the like, there’s bound to be people on it that you know.

Buy this app: Download the Gowalla app now

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