Gowalla
The prettier check-in app from Austin that lost the SXSW war to Foursquare, was bought by Facebook for its team and switched off three months later
Gowalla was a location check-in app built in Austin, Texas by Josh Williams and Scott Raymond and launched at SXSW in March 2009, the same week as Foursquare. It rewarded check-ins with illustrated virtual stamps and items rather than points, and it was widely praised for its design. Facebook bought the company in December 2011 for its team and closed the service on 11 March 2012. Williams brought the name back as a new app in 2023.
Timeline [edit]
- 2009
-
13 March 2009
Launch
Gowalla launches at SXSW
The same week as Foursquare.
-
December 2009
Funding
Series A from Greylock and Founders Fund
About $8.4 million.
- 2010
-
June 2010
Version
Gowalla 3: Trips and Highlights
- 2011
-
September 2011
pivot
Rebuilt as a social travel guide
Check-ins pulled from Foursquare and Facebook.
-
2 December 2011
Acquisition
Facebook buys Gowalla
The team moves to work on Timeline.
- 2012
-
11 March 2012
Shutdown
Gowalla goes offline
- 2023
-
13 March 2023
Revival
Gowalla returns as a new app
Same name, same stamps, new code.
The site through time
Read the old front page here, in one piece, from our own capture: gowalla.com, 3 June 2010 →
Browse gowalla.com as it was, via the Internet Archive's Wayback Machine:
Ownership [edit]
Key figures [edit]
| Metric | Value | As of | Confidence |
|---|---|---|---|
| Registered accounts ▲ | 600,000 | June 2011 | Estimated Widely cited figure during 2011 |
Confirmed official figures · Reported media, cites a source · Estimated analyst or our estimate
Why it shut down [edit]
Official line: Facebook bought Gowalla in December 2011 for its people, not its product. The founders moved to Facebook to work on Timeline, users were told they could export their check-ins, and the service closed on 11 March 2012. Josh Williams relaunched the name as a new app in March 2023.
Our analysis: Gowalla and Foursquare launched the same week at the same conference with the same idea, and for two years the press treated it as a two-horse race. It was not. Foursquare made checking in a game with a leaderboard and mayorships that people argued about; Gowalla made it a collection of lovely stamps that nobody competed for. Gowalla also had a smaller city footprint and kept rebuilding its core mechanic, which confused the people who had stayed. By the time Facebook added check-ins to its own app in 2010 the category was already being absorbed into bigger networks, and a team that good was worth more to Facebook than a second-place app.
History [edit]
Two apps, one conference
Alamofire, a small Austin studio that had made a Facebook game about collecting items, turned that idea into a phone app and launched it at SXSW on 13 March 2009. You opened Gowalla, saw the places around you, and checked in; each spot gave you a hand-drawn stamp for your passport, and sometimes a virtual item you could drop somewhere else for a stranger to pick up. Foursquare launched at the same festival the same week, and the two were compared in every article for the next two years.
Gowalla was the one people liked to look at. The illustrations were commissioned, the city guides were edited, and the app won design awards. It raised money from Founders Fund and Greylock, added Trips and Highlights, and reached an audience usually reported at around 600,000 users, a respectable number that was a fraction of what Foursquare was counting.
Losing the game
Foursquare had turned checking in into a competition, with mayorships that people fought over in public, and it expanded faster. Gowalla kept changing its mind about what it was: first a collecting game, then a travel guide, then in 2011 a social travel app that rebuilt check-ins around Foursquare and Facebook data. Each redesign lost some of the people who had liked the previous one, and the check-in itself was becoming a feature inside Facebook, Twitter and Google rather than a reason to open a separate app.
On 2 December 2011 it was reported that Facebook had bought the company. The deal was for the team: Williams, Raymond and most of the staff moved to Facebook to work on Timeline, and the announcement on 5 December said Gowalla would close at the end of January. It actually ran until 11 March 2012, when the site and apps were switched off. Users could export their check-ins and photos before then.
A second life
In March 2023 Josh Williams relaunched Gowalla as a new app with the original look, the stamps and the passport, built on a fresh codebase. It is a small product with the old name, which is why this record is marked revived rather than simply dead.
The domain today
gowalla.com is the home of the 2023 app. The 2009 to 2012 check-ins are gone, apart from whatever people exported at the time.
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Sources [edit]
- Facebook acquires Gowalla TechCrunch 2 December 2011
- Gowalla shutting down March 11 The Verge 10 March 2012
- Gowalla Wikipedia 1 January 2024 [archived]
- Gowalla is back TechCrunch 13 March 2023
- Gowalla vs. Foursquare Mashable 1 March 2010
Last verified: 22 August 2026. Spotted an error? Suggest an edit (corrections with sources are reviewed and applied).