Julia Slaughter

I don’t know how many players there are in this game exactly, it seems like too many to count. However,  I picked the two that researched seemed to indicate were the big dogs in the game  – FourSquare and GoWalla and two that I’ve seen all over Facebook – Loopt and Whrrl. I spent quite a fews weeks playing with all of them, and here’s what I learned.

The first player I knocked out of the game and off my iPhone was Loopt. The interface was clean and straight forward, though it wasn’t the best looking interface of the apps I looked at. The strength of Loopt for me is that you can setup events which I liked alot, but I ultimately ruled it out because it somehow seemed that when I went to check in – the database was always off.

The other three apps would all have me close to where I was, while Loopt had me miles from where I wanted to be. This was particularly frustrating when I went to add new locations, I would get this tiny little map and I thought I would be in close proximity to where I actually was only to find out when I looked at the website it was almost impossible to get the address sorted out without getting a site administrator involved. A few days of that and I was totally frustrated, so I hung it up.

FourSquare and GoWalla are considered to be the two heavy weights in the game but FourSquare was the next app that I ruled. Again the interface was pretty clean and straightforward, a little nicer than Loopt but I wouldn’t say that their interface was the slickest.  FourSquare is the app that has the “Mayor” feature that allows the person who checks in the most to be the Mayor of a location, however you can pretty much check in anywhere without having to be there, which I didn’t like. (Especially since some places like Starbucks are offering incentives for location Mayors, it seems like it will lead to some false check-ins.)

Next up for me was GoWalla, I still have it on my iPhone and still use it on occasion.  Of all of the apps, GoWalla has the nicest interface, the visuals are bold and bright – it makes you want to use it. (They have a game where you collect and leave items, which I’m kind of *meh* about.) I love the passport which shows your checks in, gives you graphical representations of states etc.  GoWalla doesn’t allow check ins until you reach a certain proximity which I like. It lets you set up Trips, where you have spots tied together by a theme or a location and once you’ve visited all the spots you get the icon for that trip added to your passport. I don’t use GoWalla more because their privacy controls seem to be all or nothing.

For me the big win was Whrrl, while it can’t hold a candle to GoWalla in the graphics department I love the privacy features. I can create locations that no one else can see but me, and every time I check in I can pick who can see it and where I want it to publish.  I’ve emailed the Whrrl team several times to get items moved into different societies, or even made recommendations, and the staff always seems interested in user feedback.

As I adopted Whrrl some of my friends have started catching on, and we’ve had those moments where we check in and at least comment on each others’ locations even if it hasn’t quite gotten us moving in the same direction yet.  I’m still hopeful that we’ll be able to use the location based social networking to facilitate a little more socializing!

The sites for these apps are:

www.Loopt.com – Since I started this, Loopt seems to have gotten an upgrade.

www.FourSquare.com

www.GoWalla.com

www.Whrrl.com