Gowalla has been creeping further and further away from the pure check-in concept, especially since they started allowing videos and pictures to be posted in March. Now, the company is developing the fresh new “Highlights” feature into an attractive alternative to Google Place Pages: City Pages. For corporate customers, the company has some more new ideas.
Highlights was the official notice that Gowalla is (finally) starting to retreat from the pure check-in concept and that they are trying to come up with some new stuff. Gowalla users can add a list of their personal highlight locations into their profile, without even having to check-in somewhere. Users can add up to 18 highlights to their profile – where’s the best coffee, a great location for a date, or even where the user proposed.Then the Texans thought to themselves, why not go one step further and sort the highlight location into their coordinating cities. So whoever wants to know where the it places to be are (at least according to the Gowalla community), then they can enter the city name into the search field and scroll through the highlights. So far, there are a little more than 30 cities in City Pages, and in Germany, (obviously) Berlin and Frankfurt am Main made it on the list.Since the feature, which really is nice and all, doesn’t bring in any cash, there are two new “goodies” for corporate customers. Starting in January 2011, visitors that check-in using Gowalla can receive a virtual Gowalla passport “Custom Passport Stamp“. The principle follows true to the saying: first come, first serve. There is only one stamp available once a day in each city, and starts at $5 on January 1st and the price will rise by $5 per day. So on December 30th, the price will be $1820 – the New Year’s Eve price is still up in the air… The stamp can be ordered through the daily stamp calendar. Sounds like a risky experiment, which it is – starting off in New York, San Francisco, and – coincidentally, Austin.So what the whole thing is really about is that those companies who buy a stamp automatically get placed in local searches as a “featured spot” – is this Gowalla’s first step in advertising? And the offer is even good for real-life: you can order a Gowalla window sticker with the individual company stamp.
Second goody: Business owners can now claim them for themselves, as we’re already familiar with through Foursquare and Yelp
In conclusion, Gowalla, which has long stood under the shadow of Foursquare, has finally taken the initiative and is well on the way to getting away from being the location-based allrounder and developing innovative new ideas to clean up their act. And the race is getting more interesting. Ben Parr from Mashable doesn’t believe that Foursquare is – despite ist four million users – Gowalla’s real competition. He’s more worried about Yelp, since Gowalla’s location-claiming is getting closer to the online community.