I am writing this post after playing with Gowalla for about three weeks. Gowalla in short is a social media game you may say in which you collect stamps, pins and items by checking into real world places with a gps and internet enabled phone. Currently only the iPhone and Android phones are supported. Stamps are spots you visited, pins are earned rewards and items are virtual things on spots with real nice logos that you can collect by swapping them out. Every time you check in on a spot your friends get a message and optionally a tweet.

The thing I am missing with Gowalla is the interaction with your friends. But if the only interaction is knowing where they are, I don't care. I have used Gowalla during a train trip and checked in at every station to collect a stamp and to look for cool collector items. My friends got bored by the message every 5 minutes and tweeted me questions about it. I got bored with a friend going from shop to shop. Seeing the check-in message was the only interaction.

The other problem in my opinion is the amount of users. There are a lot of spots in my part of the Netherlands where I am the only one checking in. Either I am not in the right places or there are not a lot of users. The activity I see from users at train stations or even a cool place like Seats2Meet is very low, like one check-in every other day and sometimes nothing for weeks.

My conclusion is that for a social media tool like Gowalla you need two things: users and (inter)activity. Gowalla is lacking both at the moment. The amount of users might grow but the lack of interactivity is really a miss.

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A couple of weeks ago we got introduced to a new feature at LinkedIn: the Profile Organizer. This is a real great feature. It gives you the possibility to keep profiles you are interested in for whatever reason in private folders so that you can handle with them later. This can be an interesting person for recruitment, a prospect, someone you like to connect with or anything else. LinkedIn is only giving this feature to paid subscribers.

Guess what? I am a paid subscriber. Not the billion dollar a year Business account but a Personal Plus account. This account gives you a bit more than the Free Personal account. Besides the Profile Organizer you get the possibility to send InMails, be part of the OpenLink Network, see more in Who Viewed My Profile, Search for References and a little bit more. This will set you back $60 a year. Is it worth it? I think yes, you get the possibility to use all of the LinkedIn features for not a lot of money.

The strange thing is that LinkedIn does not advertise with or mentions the Personal Plus account at all. So this makes me wonder. Is Personal Plus obsolete? Is it new? I own my account for almost a year now, because my brother in law has the same account. He was pointed at it by a friend. But LinkedIn? They don't talk about it at all. On the other hand. The account is updated once in a while, hence the addition of the Profile Organizer. You can subscribe to it, so I presume they do support it.

When the Profile Organizer got introduced I sent out two tweets saying:

"Very usefull feature @LinkedIn: Profile Organizer bit.ly/KIThO Why is it they don't inform people about availability of PersonalPlus?" and

"This accounttype for only $60/yr can be found through linkedin.com/personalplus Why is that @LinkedIn?".

This gave no reaction at all, not even from LinkedIn. But this week I saw a blogpost from my LinkedIn friend Neal Schaffer where he asks "The new LinkedIn Profile Organizer: Worth the upgrade?". My reply was "At $60/yr for www.linkedin.com/personalplus I think it is worth the upgrade. I like the feature." This lead to a conversation in where Neal subscribed to Personal Plus and wrote a blogpost about his findings.

Does anyone know why LinkedIn is not advertising with Personal Plus? Do you use Personal Plus? Please share your experience.

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