Michael Schilder

Facebook Buys Gowalla

Well, this is an interesting development. Gowalla was a product for which I always admired the design sense, and the goal. It’s meant to tell more of a location based story than Foursquare. However the mobile app suffers from some idiosyncrasies that made it less than useful, whereas 4SQ felt more stable, and let’s admit it, had waaaaay more users.

This would instantly add an enormous user base to Gowalla, and of course tightly integrate Gowalla check-ins with FB check-ins.

parislemon:

How does Facebook keep pace in mobile with the built-for-mobile and insanely well-designed Path? Here’s one piece.

Assuming this deal is finalized — great scoop by Laurie Segall — I’m really happy for the Gowalla team. They were putting an emphasis on design and attention to detail in the mobile space well before it was the cool thing to do. And they stayed true to their roots and did it all from Austin, Texas.

Google should have scooped them up way before Facebook could. But well… Yeah.

Related: Facebook has a lot of fucking awesome design talent at their disposal now.

Source: parislemon