Elephantsquared. » gowalla

Gowalla now available at the Android Market

George T — Sat, 06 Mar 2010 12:59:24 +0000

It’s been a couple of weeks since Gowalla released a beta version for Android. Now it’s time for the first release which is available at the Android Market. Just go to ‘Market’ and search for ‘Gowalla’. Obviously this is a slightly better version than the beta one. (Note: I had to uninstall the beta version first because I kept getting an installation error ‘Package file was not signed correctly’)

On the other hand, Foursquare now has a new person leading the Android app development, Mark Wyszomierski. There are already some nice new features added to the latest foursquare app like adding friends, managing friend requests and global search.

What do you think? Who will eventually win? Foursquare or Gowalla?

Foursquare goes global and launces Palm version

George T — Tue, 05 Jan 2010 22:59:04 +0000

It’s been very-very-very busy start for this year. I was having a conversation with a friend about the technology in 2010 and we both agreed that 2010 is probably going to be the year of tablets or smartphones. After tonight’s event at Google HQ I think I misspelled smartphones. I should have said superphones.

Anyhow a few hours ago foursquare announced that you can now check-in from *anywhere* and later they released their Palm version of foursquare in the Palm Marketplace! Just go to the Marketplace from your Palm device and search for foursquare.

I am interested in Gowalla‘s next move.

Hurray! Location, location, location!

P.S. I just saw that Google Reader for mobile got some great new/old features.

Foursquare, Gowalla and Rally. How much location can you handle?

George T — Wed, 30 Dec 2009 00:23:27 +0000

Foursquare, Gowalla and Rally. If you are not familiar with these three (3) apps I think it’s time you change this, because 2010 is going to be all about location, location and location. These apps launched in 2009 and are about to get crazy in the following years. All these location-based social applications are excellent pieces of software that converge to the provision of one of the most valuable type of information nowadays, that is location. It occurs to me that location is more like a synonym to the year 2010 and an indistinguishable part of the new era of the mobile industry.

The first one (foursquare) which is available on both iPhone App Store and Android Market is the one that, in my opinion, is the predominant candidate for this convergence. The second one (Gowalla), looks a lot like foursquare but outcomes foursquare when it comes to the user interface (for the time being..) which is definitely far more attractive. However both of them can be considered as the best location-based social app. The latter (rally) is the newest member of the “location” family and it claims that it brings real friends together by utilizing some unique concepts like the “home” location. I didn’t have the chance to use rally but to what I ‘ve heard, rally is taking a long shot here by refreshing/filtering your social network and I am sure it will be discussed a lot in the near future.

Do you like/use/prefer/enjoy/dislike/etc. any of these apps? The sure thing is, we ‘ll see more apps like these coming up and there is nothing you can do to stop this. :P