Back in November our head of digital Eb Adeyeri penned his five big things to watch out for in 2011 including location-based services such as Facebook Places, Gowalla, Whrrl, Foursquare and CauseWorld.
The examples I mention above represent just a small fraction of the numerous check-in tools actually available. Gowalla and Foursquare were definitely the front-runners in this space until Facebook announced the launch of Places.
Faced with so much choice, and the prospect of having to build a whole new community, many asked whether users would simply default to Places and their existing community of friends. Lets face it given the choice, and an easy one at that, would could blame them.
Now I use Foursquare and Places, but find having to check-in on two separate services, quite time consuming not least because I invariably have to explain to people who I am out with why I’m glued to my phone.
Anyone who’s seen the film ‘The Highlander’ will remember the line ‘there can be only one’ spoken by Christopher Lambert and Facebook it seems are well placed to achieve that battle for supremacy.
However a blog post from Gowalla peaked my interest today announcing the first effort to unify some of the major players in the location space – namely Foursquare and Facebook.
So what does this mean? Well not only can you now check-in to the services I’ve already mentioned, Gowalla pulls in all the check-ins from your friends on those services.
This is a really smart move on Gowalla’s part making its service compatible with Facebook and Foursquare. Allowing its existing users to connect with friends on other networks will improve retention and make the platform far more attractive to brands looking to invest in check-in services.
So the battle for supremacy is by no means over and Gowalla has certainly made steps to ensure a longer-term future for the location-based tool.
Tags: Facebook, Foursquare, Gowalla, location based marketing
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