The basic premise of Gowalla (and Foursquare) is that, as you travel around, you virtually check in at locations you stop at. It's a bit of a laborious process, to be sure -launch the app, tap through to check in, wait for a list of nearby locations to appear, select the one you want, then confirm your check-in. It might also appear to be utterly without a point.
It quickly becomes quite fun, though. For starters, there's a gaming element, with leaderboards, items and more, and some savvy small businesses are looking at their locations' leaderboards and offering rewards and incentives to regular customers, You can leave tips and comments for other users, and upload photos associated with each location.
The gaming element continues with the idea of 'trips', the modern descendents of a pub crawl. People create trips by listing must-see themed locations, and you can follow along on these community-created walking tours of cities.
As with other social services, however, it really only gets to be fun when your friends are using it too. You can enable optional Push notifications on a per-person basis, which alert you when friends check in, You might see someone saying, for example, that they're going to see a movie with a mutual friend, and you could then drop them a line to ask if you can come along too.
.
No comments:
Post a Comment