Antifeatures: big mistake that location app developers make - Scobleizer

Scoble’s post on Gowalla vs Foursquare vs location apps in general.

He goes off on this weird thing about checking in at the Ritz down the road on Foursquare when he goes home. I can’t even begin to argue with that. I don’t think he knows what either service is for. Foursquare is “Hey dudes, I’m at Bar X where I’m totally the Mayor!”. Gowalla is, very simply, virtual geo-caching where you can also say “Hey dudes, I’m at Bar X and I just picked up a Tourbus icon”.

People keep trying to compare these services - but to me, they have very different missions.

But leave it to Josh (Alamofire/Gowalla CEO) to get a shot in in the comments…

Robert — Thank you for taking the time to give Gowalla a spin. I understand your frustration with our GPS logic. It doesn’t always work as well as we would hope when large buildings are involved. We’re looking forward to continued improvements.

I do have one question for you though, regarding your first point above: Why do you lie to your readers and tell them you could not check in at Sequoia Hospital with Gowalla when this is clearly not true?

In fact, you created the Sequoia Hospital spot on our service. Was this a simple oversight, bending the truth or a white lie? Is this blog a game like Foursquare where checkins can be fudged?

http://gowalla.com/spots/25856

Just play it straight.

Whoops. JW came out fighting.

Of course Scoble means he couldn’t check in inside the hospital but, once a Gowalla spot is created, the GPS line of site ‘problem’ is a non-issue. As you’re walking into the place pull up the app and it finds you (about 10 times faster than the old Gowalla 1.1 did too). The new app even lets you do your checkin note and item swapping once you’re inside - it remembers that you hit the spot.

I’m excited to see how this space grows once the Twitter API (which, lets be honest, all the these services rely on) is made location aware. And that’s any day now…

Yep, I’m still very biased against the non-operational Foursquare. I’ve been wanting in on that app since it appeared. I kept going back to the Help page occasionally too - just to see if anything new had been added about global support.

They added Amsterdam one time. That’s about it.