Ronny’s Personal Blog

A while ago I wrote a post questioning how social social media is. This was basically a review of Gowalla. Not long after that post Gowalla surprised us with a major update in which it became possible to interact with each other and to post photo's on a spot. I was pretty happy with this update in the beginning, but now three months later I must confess that I did not have a single conversation using Gowalla. All the conversations are outside Gowalla on either Twitter or Facebook. To me Gowalla is still not a social platform.

It is a nice game though. I became addicted to collect the items that can be found on spots. And through that collection game I came in contact with MacMannes: the developer of GowallaSwag. Our first contact was an email exchange about a spot I created which was not properly centered. A couple of weeks later I found his fresh app in the appstore. A great app which I will comment on later. We then got connected on LinkedIn and planned to meet in real life later on. As you may guess, this meetup was all about Gowalla and GowallaSwag. Maybe this thing is social after all!

GowallaSwag is a great app written for itemcollectors in Gowalla. Within Gowalla it is not possible to look at spots where you are not checked in to find missing items. With GowallaSwag that suddenly is possible. When I started using GowallaSwag I had about thirty items in my vault in 4 months time. When I started using GowallaSwag I jumped to about ninety in a month time. The app makes it possible to search the spots around you and look at the items on that spot. I then schedule or reroute a trip to pass a spot with an item I am missing. In the first update came the option to look at other places than the ones around you and they could be visualized on a map. The not yet released update that I have in beta has a real nice option to filter on spots with items that you are missing. This is for the lazy people like me. And I must admit: this grew my vault with twenty items in the last week. A tiny problem with this last option is that it takes a lot of time when you are on a 2G network. This is because the app has to download two big lists and compare them locally. What I do instead is look around my destination the night before and make screenshots of spots with missing items. I then check in at the spots when I visit my destination the next day. 

One big tip: I sometimes misuse the gps-inaccuracy of my iPhone. In a train or inside a building this inaccuracy is sometimes up to a kilometer. This gives me the option to check into a spot without actually visiting it. Combined with GowallaSwag this is a very nice "feature". ;-)