Gowalla

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Gowalla is a location checkin silo that operated from 2007 to 2012 and was then rebooted in 2021. It is functionally similar to Foursquare but with a unique design aesthetic that won it loyal fans.

History

It was acquired by Facebook and unceremoniously shut down soon after, despite their cheerful announcement:

2011-12-02 Jason Kincaid: Facebook Has Acquired Gowalla (archived)

We’re excited to announce that we’ll be making the journey to California to join Facebook

as mentioned in 2014-01-09 Jeremy Keith: Time (archived)

Screenshots

Screenshots of the original Gowalla are preserved in older blog posts, including:

• https://techcrunch.com/2010/03/31/gowalla-ipad-screenshot/
• https://www.pushing-pixels.org/2011/03/07/screenshots-of-gowalla-3-for-android.html

Reboot

In 2021, Josh Williams announced that he was bringing back Gowalla in a new form, with new co-founder Patrick Piemonte. They launched a "Street Team" beta program for early adopters. The new Gowalla uses aspects of augmented reality and NFTs.

The podcast The Gowalla Story ran in 2021 for 5 episodes, hosted by Josh Williams and Dan Benjamin: "an exploration of the rise, fall, reinvention, and reimagining of a startup"

See Also

• location
• checkin
• silo
• site-deaths
• incredible journey
• https://twitter.com/jw/status/1598367524273340416?s=46&t=f61hD47BlB5wV_4uFHQgpQ
  • "Excited to finally share this: We’re rolling out a new @gowalla website today to prepare for an app launch early next year. We want to make it easy and fun to keep up with your friends in the real world.
    
    🧵https://gowalla.com" @jw December 1, 2022