Pick Your Corner: The Battle Over Check-Ins Has Just Begun

Foursquare came roaring out of the box less than six months ago and has, by all accounts, become the leader in location-based services. But that isn’t stopping Gowalla from aggressively going after its rival.

According to CNET, Gowalla has just launched some new features Foursquare doesn’t have, plus a couple of high profile promotions that are designed to boost its credibility and usage.

One Gowalla promotion is a collaboration with Nike and Lance Armstrong’s cancer-fighting Livestrong foundation that ties in with the Tour de France. Messages of inspiration submitted by the public are reviewed, and some are selected for a kind of instant printing along the cyclists’ route using a robotic “chalkbot” machine. Gowalla’s role in all this is that the chalkbot will check in with its location on Gowalla, and it will post photos of the painted messages as well. Users of Gowalla can also check into Nike retail locations and receive a Tour de France virtual “pin.”

A second Gowalla promotion is tied in with the tenth anniversary of crowdsourcing t-shirt site Threadless.com. The “Threadless Everywhere Tour” is making its way across the country this summer in a converted Airstream trailer. The trailer will be a mobile Gowalla spot, employing a GPS to update its location automatically. A Gowalla user who checks in on the Airstream could receive a free limited edition t-shirt.

These promotions notwithstanding, Foursquare seems to have a big jump on its competitor. Foursquare has gained traction with big advertisers and even publishers.

Foursquare also has a lot more users and is apparently growing faster than Gowalla. Analytics firm RJMetrics monitored Foursquare and Gowalla APIs for the past four weeks, and the results indicate that Foursquare has over 1.9 million users to Gowalla’s 340,000 or so. Foursquare’s daily percentage growth rate is 75 percent higher than Gowalla’s, according to the analysis. Foursquare has approximately 5.6 million venues to Gowalla’s 1.4 million venues.

As might be expected, other competitors are popping up in this space, and some of them could be players. Brightkite, for example, was compared with Foursquare and Gowalla in the “Check-in Services Bug Battle” conducted by more than 300 uTesters from nearly 40 countries. Kevin Tofel analyzed the results for GigaOM. He found that while Foursquare was tops in Ease-of-Use and Social Media Integration, Brightkite came in second over Gowalla in both those categories. Gowalla, however, bested Foursquare and Brightkite in Location Accuracy. Tofel points out that there are other competitors to consider, including Geodelic, MyTown, and Where.com.

Location-based services are really poised for growth. In mid-June, Twitter announced Twitter Places for geo-tagging and said the new feature would soon link to Foursquare and Gowalla. The just-introduced Yelp 2.0 has location check-in services. Google Buzz has location capabilities. Facebook isn’t sitting on the geolocation sidelines, either.

Location-based services and advertising is a hot new field. It would be wise to keep an eye on Gowalla and Foursquare to see what innovations and changes they bring in the next few months.