jjprojects: our social web

Much is being said at the moment about the battle for early-ish users between location-based services Foursquare and Gowalla, so I won’t go over old ground by explaining how they work here. Explanations are not hard to come by.

What I will say is that I’ve been using Foursquare for a few months, ever since it became available in Sydney. I’ve also been using Gowalla more in the last couple of weeks, after installing it earlier but not really using it that much. I’ve decided to keep using both for a while to see how each develops and which one I like more over time. No doubt both of these services will develop a fair bit in the coming months, so is it perhaps a bit early to tell which one is going to be better?

Gowalla has only recently added the ability to snap and upload photos from a location you’ve checked-in at, and also to make comments on other people’s posts. I like both of these features a lot, and it’s made me want to use Gowalla more, for now. Perhaps Foursquare will be thinking seriously about added features such as this.

I’ve noticed that in Foursquare, fewer people actually comment, or rather “shout” when they check-in somewhere. I wonder if this would change if there was the ability for people to comment on their posts? After all, it was the reply function of Twitter that really got that going in the early days.

The whole Foursquare vs Gowalla debate that seems to be going on in the blogosphere reminds me of the days (not so long ago really) when people were debating between Pownce and Twitter, and whether there was room enough for both new services to survive. Needless to say, Pownce isn’t around anymore and Twitter has tens of millions of monthly users. I don’t think it was that Pownce was a bad service at all, in fact it had some really great features. It’s just that everyone was over on Twitter. Twitter had the momentum from early on. Eventually, that momentum carried it all the way to celebrities starting to us it, and consequently into the talk show circuit. The rest is history.

Will there be room enough for both Foursquare and Gowalla this time? I know, I know, there are others in the space too I here you say, but Foursquare and Gowalla are the two that are getting the most blog and column centimetres  for now.

What’s your take? Have you tried both? Which one do you prefer at the moment? Do you think they’ll both be able to survive? Which one are most of your social media friends using? Perhaps that’s the best measure.

Technorati Tags: Foursquare, Gowalla, LBS, location