Gowalla – Steve Novoselac's Blog

Foursquare, Gowalla, Brightkite… Check.In Fatigue

Location based services. They aren’t new. Back 5-6 years ago I was at Sprint PCS (Northern PCS) and dorking around with LBS from MIcrosoft and Cell phones. The stuff has just matured.

So, ok. You use the LBS apps. Foursquare, Gowalla, Brightkite, Yelp, Loopt… whatever. Personally there is so much fragmentation it is ridiculous. No single “places” db. Some venues have mayorship deals, some don’t care about anything but one app, etc.

The best thing I have seen so far is Check.In (web app) on my iPhone, which will do all 3 major services (more coming) at once. The thing is, you have to be on network. Problem is, most places I go to , there is no wifi, or cell coverage. So you just can’t even check in.

The other thing that comes up often is “check in fatigue”. Which is what you get after you go to a ton of different places and you spend more time checking in or trying to check in rather than enjoying the venue.

In the little town I am living in, there is once place with deals for mayorship – a coffee shop. And guess who is mayor? An employee. Forget it. Why even have any deals?

I am seriously thinking of just jumping out of the LBS app game, when you get down to it, just not enough time in the day to worry about “checking in” and really not getting much out of it. I would rather see it that if i am walking by a place, they txt me with a deal or do something to catch my attention, then me fight for some check in deal that I would never get.

Mobile/LBS apps will grow and mature and it is exciting to see where the space will go. Mainstream? not for a while, if ever. Trying to keep with my “appless” mode, I haven’t installed any LBS apps on my phone yet this week. (I have installed 4 other apps, but it is minimal :))

Mayorship really gets you nothing but bragging rights (and who really cares?) and not much else. I would rather spend my time reading or learning or hanging out with my babby 🙂

The New Hipster: Going Appless

Love the iPhone, really do. But I am pretty hardcode when it comes to apps and loading things and making it “work” hard. Every once in a while some rogue app goes off the wall and starts draining battery like crazy. Usually the only thing to do is restore phone. I have had to do this, and a few other people I know have see it as well. I don’t blame the iPhone, I blame the apps. Just like windows mobile, the apps were the problem 🙂

Anyways, this time, instead of restoring my phone from backup, I just let it stay “clean”. I decided to not install any apps for as long as I can. It has been 24 hours, so that says something 🙂

But what I am doing is going back to the iPhone roots, back to 2007. Web apps. Steve Jobs himself says it is their “other”, open, unrestricted platform they support, so let’s see what it can offer.

Facebook? touch.facebook.com
Twitter? m.twitter.com
Flickr? m.flickr.com
YouTube (the HTML5 version is better than the native app!) m.youtube.com
FourSquare/Gowalla? check.in
Reeder/Google Reader? google’s mobile formatted reader site works.
Other apps? openappmkt.com
IM? meebo has a pretty good web app.

Just like regular hipsters, that drink PBR, and lose the flavor and other added benefits of drinking a less “hip” beer, you have to give some things up.. such as..

Push Notifications – not sure yet if this is a good or bad thing to give up. The current implementation just seems to annoy anyways

Background/Streaming music (Pandora/Last.fm, etc) – I did find dance.fm has a HTML5 version or something that streams directly from a web page, so I could almost say others might follow suit. I also have iPod on the device so not to worried, I don’t listen to a helluva lot of music anyways.

What else? Not sure yet, we will see how long I last. One thing I can say, there are some games that are web apps that are pretty cool, but don’t come close to the native games … yet.

Of course I will probably start installing some apps eventually, and after a while I will be back to my old app going ways 🙂