Gowalla

» see gowalla.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obituary ~

gowalla was the kind of product that sxsw 2010 was built to showcase. founded by josh williams and scott raymond in austin in 2007, originally called alamofire, it pivoted to location social right when foursquare did, and for about two years the press treated them as the two horses in the race. gowalla had the better art. dennis crowley's foursquare had the better growth. that gap got wider every quarter, and by mid 2011 it was clear which one was winning.

the visual design was the whole identity. every check-in spot had its own hand-drawn illustration. badges and stamps got designed by an in-house artist as if they were actual passport stamps. the app's app store screenshots looked like a moleskine notebook. people who chose gowalla over foursquare often did so on aesthetic grounds, the same way some people pick instagram over snapchat or were on path before facebook killed it.

i was 26 when gowalla launched, on ttnet broadband at home with an SMS-era nokia, and had no reason to use a US-anchored check-in app where the closest pin to me would have been seven flights away. austin / SXSW culture is one of those things i could read about on techcrunch but not be inside. the gowalla aesthetic showed up in screenshots on hacker news, and i remember thinking it looked nicer than foursquare without ever installing either.

~ the case file ~

~ the climb ~

greylock partners led an $8.4M round in december 2009, with chris sacca and kevin rose as angels. the team peaked at around 35 people, mostly designers and ios engineers. version 4.0 in september 2011 tried to pivot away from raw check-ins toward "trips" and curated travel guides, which was an admission that the check-in mechanic itself was lost. by then foursquare was at 15 million users while gowalla was hovering around 600k.

~ the day it died ~

facebook announced the acqui-hire on december 2 2011. the official statement was carefully worded: facebook is not buying gowalla's user data, only the team and the IP. the founders went to facebook's timeline group. on march 11 2012 the gowalla service was shut off entirely. users got a final export option for their check-in history before the website redirected to a goodbye message and the illustrated badges and trip guides went dark in one batch.

~ the long tail ~

josh williams relaunched gowalla in march 2023 as a different product, more of a friend-finder layer over your existing location data. that revival is still nominally operational but never reached the original's cultural footprint. the dead thing is the 2007-2012 austin design-darling, not the 2023 reboot. for that 5-year window it was the case study people used when arguing that craft and aesthetics could compete with raw scale, and then it became the case study people used when arguing they could not.

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