Foursquare vs. Gowalla on Symbian (!?!)

by crossroadmedia on Apr.01, 2010, under Pop Culture, SXSW

Location-based social networking broke out at SXSW Interactive in 2009 when Foursquare and Gowalla made their debuts. The rivalry that was established has heated up significantly and reached a new peak at SXSW 2010. Since then the battle for supremacy over this white-hot social networking channel has continued at a fever pitch.

I had not joined either of these sites until a couple weeks ago when I was in Austin for SXSW Interactive, my first trip to SXSW. The buzz about Foursquare and Gowalla was loud, almost deafening. After discussing them over lunch with @rmmdc, and watching him check into both on his iPhone, I decided to try them out side by side, then blog about it. What makes my comparison interesting is that I don’t have an iPhone, a Blackberry, or an Android phone, so experience on both has been via their respective mobile sites (http://m.gowalla.com and http://foursquare.com/mobile) on my Nokia e71 smartphone running Symbian. (yes go ahead and laugh – I think I was the only person at SXSW who didn’t have an iPhone or a ‘Berry)

The Foursquare Symbian experience: has been good. Foursquare gets major props for clearly stating that users can either download their apps for iPhone or Blackberry – if you dont have either then use their mobile site. The e71 remembers my login credentials, 4sq’s mobile UI is easily navigable and responds quickly. Overall it has been really positive, almost flawless.

The Gowalla Symbian experience : has been bad. Gowalla told me up front that the service is currently available only for iPhone, Android, and Palm, however they then go on to offer up a link to their mobile site as an alternative (just like Foursquare does), which is somewhat confusing/misleading because it seems to indicate that the mobile site replicates the function of the apps, but its not even close. When i try to log onto their mobile site from my e71, browser, nothing happens. Failure to load is the best way to describe it.

The bottom line? Gowalla is missing a major opportunity to gain audience share by failing so miserably with their mobile site. According to most stats I have seen recently, they are running behind Foursquare by anywhere between from 400 – 600k users. It’s not as if they couldn’t afford to test on the e71 and other Symbian platofrms – FastCompany details the advantage they had early on in investment dollars.

This analysis by Gartner explains the value and cost of developing mobile business architectures on alternative platforms – and its quite clear that with such a large share of the mobile audience, investing in Symbian development is well worth it.

I really want to like Gowalla. Maybe they will read this and make a better effort to extend their user experience to Symbian devices. Until then, I will be using Foursquare.

:Android, Apple, Blackberry, Foursquare, geolocation, Google, Gowalla, iPhone, Nokia, RIM, SXSW, SXSWi, Symbian

5 Comments for this entry

Josh Chandler
April 1st, 2010 on 5:25 pm
Hey Ben,

Thanks for sharing your thoughts on the Symbian experience. I think that it’s good to see Foursquare and Gowalla covering their bases, but will the Symbian crowd be as actively receptive to the app as iPhone users have been?

There’s a certain level of inclusion which comes with owning an iPhone, and as such many have opted to use Foursquare and Gowalla on it
Netwalker
April 28th, 2010 on 2:40 pm
Nice review. And I fully agree with you. I’m also a Nokia user (N97) and I dislike gowalla because it can be used in symbian phones. For Foursquare I have been using Gravity, that allows me to use twitter and foursquare together.

Several of my iphone friends have changed to foursquare because a lot of other people is there.

Hope gowalla takes in mind to develop for other platforms
AJK
August 2nd, 2010 on 5:43 am
Opera Mobile 10.1 beta browser now has location awareness, which means you can log into Gowalla’s mobile site and update your location.
John Manzo
August 20th, 2010 on 12:12 pm
Anybody who “laughs” at your E71 is a fucking moron. It’s one of the best smartphones ever made.

Gowalla and other developers are really dropping the ball by not seeing beyond their borders. Unfortunately US-based social networking sites are pretty much all in the same boat and they all make Symbian their last priority, if they make it a priority at all. Contrast that with Skype, which being a European company recognized where the money was- it’s the 5+ billion people who DON’T live in North America- and offered its full mobile version (not “skype mobile” nonsense) on Symbian and on Nokia dumbphones. You have to think internationally.
Tarek
August 29th, 2010 on 9:09 pm
For people like me who happen to live outside the United States, Nokia/Symbian is by far number one here, however our problem is that most of the so called Web2.0 startups and application are based in the United States. And for the Americans, the world just ends at their borders, they believe that we do not exist, hence their startups won’t give a rats whatever to us, and just ignores us and don’t spend a penny in developing applications for Nokia phones. For them, a mobile phone is just a fruit (either an Apple or a Blackberry) and that it.