Gowalla vs. Foursquare: A European usage perspective
It will come as no surprise to those of you that know us that we are hugely interested in location-based social services such as Foursquare and Gowalla. We may even have some ideas of our own that fit in with these types of services…
I personally have been an active Foursquare user, since even before Stockholm was officially launched (Thanks Dens!). I really like the iPhone app, and think there are some amazing interactions beginning to happen on Foursquare (both person to person and person to merchants).
I have of course tested out Gowalla, but never became an active user. I *like* the service a lot, but something never clicked with me.
But in the last few weeks, I noticed quite a few of the people that were trying out both services moved over to Gowalla as their “default” service, mainly people here in Stockholm. For various reasons, I decided to get to the bottom of this.
My fellow ex-Google SPD Jon Steinberg looked at this recently in his post 24 Hours of Gowalla and Foursquare, which had a much more detailed methodology than I need for now, but no European geographic breakdown. But his summary was spot on regarding the overall level of usage of these services:
The strongest conclusion that can be drawn is that it is indeed early days of these services, and the order of magnitude of usage we are seeing is thousands and tens of thousands, as opposed to hundreds of thousands and millions. With that said, from small seeds grow mighty oaks.
And of course, from Foursquare we have the recent announcement that they are now averaging over 1 check-in per second (extrapolate that: more than 86,000 check-ins per day). Those small seeds seem to be taking root.
But still, what was going on with Gowalla’s surge? To see what was going on in Europe with these services, I quickly threw some searches at Twitter Search. I would check out how many people had each service automatically tweet out their check-ins, in a number of major European cities.
Unfortunately, it seems that the vast majority of 4sq or Gowalla users still have not authorized auto-geotagging (which both apps will do if you have pre-authorized your Twitter account). So I was not able to use the geo metadata for this (nor do I have the hacking chops to do this well).
Instead, I just looked for tweets with the services’ short URL (Gowal.la or 4sq.com), plus the city name. There may be some issues with city names not always fitting it the tweet, I am not sure how either service formats the addresses when running short on space. And of course there are about another 100 ways biases creep into this, but really do not need anything too perfect at this time.
The results were really interesting. It turns out Stockholm seems to be one Gowalla-lovin city! The rest of Europe, not so much… Below is the raw data, based on tweeted check-ins January 14th up until around 15.00.
City Gowalla Checkins Foursquare Checkins
Stockholm 69 7
Helsinki 1 9
Berlin 13 34
Oslo 5 0
London 12 82
Dublin 1 20
Spain (Madrid OR Barcelona) 2 7
Amsterdam 1 33
Hamburg 1 20
Milan (OR Milano) 1 1
Copenhagen (OR København) 1 7
Paris 12 43
Zurich 1 3
Total 120 266
Total Minus Stockholm 51 259
So as you can see, Stockholm users accounted for over half of the checkins across 13 major cities. I think Stockholm will be a very interesting case to follow, the network effects in place here seem to really lead people to go with Gowalla. How will this compare to other cities where Foursquare has clear lead?
So, if you ignore Stockholm, Foursquare seems to have a 5:1 advantage of usage. Always good to get hard data, even if it might be a bit funky!
Update: Should have just gone here to see how much Stockholm is an outlier:
