Travelers and city adventurers looking for a better way to harness geolocation data for their own amusement, get ready: Gowalla is releasing a brand new beta feature designed to crowdsource the best a city has to offer.
Gowalla Highlights is a web-based product that currently consists of 18 place-based questions that query members about their favorite date night locales, watering holes, spots for people watching or celebrity sightings, etc.
The power of the product is in the aggregate. Gowalla(
) users will be able to discover the best places in town, as determined by popular vote, and easily find new coffee spots or bars to try out when visiting a foreign city.
The feature itself is both simple and enjoyable to use. Gowalla users will find the Highlights section accessible from their profile page. From here, they can respond to unique prompts and share the places where big and small life moments took place. From the Highlights page, users can then check out the places that matter to their friends and view the most popular among all members.
Highlights is essentially a way to surface the best places for any given city.
“We were inspired to create Highlights when we started building Gowalla for iPad. It got us thinking about how we could visualize places in interesting ways,” said CEO and Co-Founder Josh Williams.
Williams also believes that Highlights will power insightful trends around places, settle local taco shop wars and have important ramifications for businesses.
He also indicates that Highlights functionality and data will trickle down to the iPhone() and Android(
) apps in about a month. The idea will be to help expose members to nearby popular places — with popular determined by the number of enjoyable experiences users have had rather than total checkins. Developers can also expect Highlights data to eventually make its way inside the API.
By turning on Highlights, Gowalla is tapping its current user base of 450,000 users to tell place-based stories in a way that could really drive home the utility of the mobile location-based service.
Hat-Tip to Mashable
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