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The concept of recording your location isn’t exactly groundbreaking. Some services, such as Loopt, have been around since 2005. What is new is taking that information and turning into an engaging game within any city. With the addition of achievements and prizes, a person “checking-in” as it’s known within these apps, now has incentives. There are a handful of services that currently look at Cities as giant game boards.

The father of this concept is Foursquare, the little cousin of Dodgeball. Dodgeball is now owned by Google, and has been rebranded Latitude. Foursquare allows users (in some cities) to check into the location they are at, and they are rewarded accordingly. If the user completes an achievement, such as going out three days in a row, they get a reward (a badge). If they are the top user/patron at a specific location, they become the mayor of that spot. This concept has worked so well, some owners of businesses in the supported cities reward mayors with free drinks or discounted food. The biggest downside to Foursquare is the lack of cities. For instance, of the 23 cities currently supported, Cleveland is not one of them. This means I cannot play Foursquare unless I travel to a supported city. There is no way for users to add places to cities that aren’t supported. I have been lobbying Foursquare to support Cleveland with no luck to date.

This is where I picked up on Gowalla. Gowalla is similar to Foursquare, except for one major difference; users can submit their own places regardless of the city. Also, users can create trips. These are a series of spots that are laid out within a city, and the user will get a reward for visiting them all.  There are also differences in the way stamp (badges) are rewarded, and there is a gifting interface that adds a “collect them all” element to the check-ins. Gowalla is new, so the user base is scarce, and it’s only supported on the iPhone right now, which limits its footprint even more. Foursquare has been around, received the attention, and gained a pretty big user base.

Just like all social services, they don’t really work unless people use them. Unfortunately, I really don’t see people moving to Gowalla, no matter how superior to Foursquare I find it. The lack of device support alone will make gaining any market share next to impossible. In major cities, where there are many more iPhone users than there are here in Cleveland, people have already began using Foursquare, and I’m sure very few will switch for the ability to add places not in their home city. Don’t get me wrong, until Foursquare comes here, I will be using Gowalla religiously. Chances are if you visit C-town and use Gowalla, I will be the one who created the entry, mostly because I’m the only person using it here right now. But when Foursquare does come, if Gowalla still has no device support, I will probably be switching over. If you have an iPhone, definitely give Gowalla a try though, even if you already use Foursquare.