Yesterday Mashable posted this biased claim about Foursquare winning the geolocation war. While the infographics are very cool looking, I think many people are being blinded by the “media darling” status of Foursquare. Take a look at the infographic, specifically at the pie chart measuring sentiment where you can see Gowalla has 53% positive mentions as opposed to Foursquare’s 38%. This statistic is the most compelling because it backs up my claim that the capabilities of Gowalla’s platform are by far better than Foursquare’s.
For either of these players to win the geolocation game, they’ll need to get big brands on board. And for big brands to get on board, these games need ways to provide useful and valuable rewards to their consumers. Foursquares mayor status and badges pale in comparison to Gowalla’s features. Gowalla wins by providing more value to both of it’s customers: brands and consumers. Here’s why:
click to view larger image
Yes, Foursquare rolled out business pages yesterday, but that doesn’t mean anything until they can figure out a way to get more locations to offer specials for being the mayor, or unlocking a certain badge. The thrill of the game gets old after a while, and consumers need real and valuable rewards in order to keep interest in checking in to places.
So my money is on Gowalla to win in the end. What do you think?
Stacy is a Strategist in the Digital Innovation Group at Engauge. She has an M.S. in Integrated Marketing Communications from Northwestern's Medill School. Connect with her on Twitter @stacycohen. 
Really great points and I really like that someone (finally) is going agains Mashable. Is not like there word is god or what? Keep it up!
Yes, good points. However, you’re only pointing out the features. Even though the features may be better, and I do really like Gowalla’s image upload and comments features, often it seems that it’s not the features that win the game.
It reminds me of the Pownce vs Twitter war back in 07. Pownce had some great features but everyone was on Twitter and it had the momentum, including in the media. Twitter won out despite all the tech glitches it constantly had for most of that year. Once celebs started using it, the battle was all but over.
Media attention has quite a bit to do with it. The likes of Mashable and others backing it as a winner should have more to do with winning the war than any features at this point.
@Torbjoern – Thanks for the support! I’m just trying to add some additional insight into a largely one-sided conversation.
@John – You make a good point. But my argument is that the only way for Foursquare or Gowalla to really take off like Twitter did is for businesses to leverage the games to provide valuable engagement for consumers. And the features of Gowalla’s platform lend themselves to these opportunities more so than Foursquare.
I agree with you that media attention has quite a bit to do with it, but I think the novelty of playing the games to receive meaningless badges, stamps, etc will wear off unless there are real incentives. This is a great opportunity for businesses to connect with consumers on their mobile phones…possibly even more valuable than other mobile marketing efforts because this is an activity they are already doing.
If a tree falls in the woods and no one is there, does it make a sound?
I couldn't agree more that I think Gowalla has a superior service to Foursquare. My concern though is that in a very, very small market — we're talking less than 1.5MM people that use the two services combined — you have one service (Foursquare) that seems to be the media darling, so they continue to grow at a faster clip.
Take a look at this chart and how much faster Foursquare is growing than Gowalla: http://siteanalytics.compete.com/foursquare.com…
The question, and perhaps this is an idea for your next blog post
, is how Gowalla will be able to catch up to Foursquare…especially with Facebook and Twitter moving into the space.