the tindog coffeehouse

CNNMoney reported last night that Facebook is buying the Austin-based check-in-turned-travel-guide site Gowalla for an undisclosed sum, presumably to incorporate some of its concepts (and engineers) into its own fledgling Timeline profile concept and then shut the company down.

And I’d just like to point out that I called it back in September. Well, sorta.

When Gowalla relaunched as “Gowalla 4.0″ in September, it eliminated the gamification aspects of the service (the pins, stamps, and items) and even the whole check-in concept itself. Users would instead “create stories” and tag people in their stories and browse and share travel guides. The UI was gorgeous as always, but there was no longer any real incentive to use it.

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This is Part 6 of my chapter-by-chapter blog of From the Garden to the City: The Redeeming and Corrupting Power of Technology by John Dyer.

In Chapter 5, Dyer focused on the “corrupting” part, examining how both Adam and Eve and their son Cain used technology as a way to separate themselves from God. But as Dyer illustrated, technology (“the human activity of using tools to transform God’s creation for practical purposes”) isn’t necessarily bad. It existed before the Fall, and even after the Fall, God continued to equip his people with more of it. Technology, then, must be neutral. Right?

Well, no.

We concluded in Chapter 1 that technology is, in fact, not neutral; as it changes, we change along with it. How and exactly why we change is the focus of this chapter.

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This is Part 4 of my chapter-by-chapter walk through From the Garden to the City by John Dyer.

We started out talking about how technology isn’t neutral, how it not only changes the world around us, but changes us as well. And we started to see how we approach technology as a sort-of mini-narrative, allowing us to bridge the gap between our current world and a better one. We then looked at Genesis and how technology really began in the Garden of Eden when God told Adam to cultivate and till the garden, taking God’s initial creation and making something new out of it. But what exactly is technology anyway? Is it the tools used to cultivate the garden, the product of that cultivation, or the know-how that guided the process along?

It seems odd that a book subtitled “The Redeeming and Corrupting Power of Technology” would wait until Chapter 4 to define what the author means by “technology”. But better late than never, I suppose. As we’ll see, however, the definition isn’t as clear-cut as we think it is.

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It’s a social network where you create status entries about things you’re doing and post related photos. You can tag friends, and they can comment on your posts. What is it? If you said Facebook, you’d be right. If you said Gowalla, well, you’d be right there, too.

Last week, I wrote about my knee-jerk reaction to Gowalla’s massive overhaul, deemed Gowalla 4.0. Gone are the game-like incentives such as pins and items, replaced by lists and guides. Instead of checking in to a place, you create a story about it.

I’ve had some time to think about it since then, and it occurred to me that in the process of becoming unlike Foursquare, Gowalla has become a sort of stripped down version of Facebook. Of course, Facebook doesn’t have the travel guides that Gowalla does, but the user activity is much the same. I’m creating a story (status update) about some place I’ve gone, not for virtual rewards but for the sheer socialness of it. Stories are meant to be social objects complete with photos, comments, tagging of friends, and sharing beyond a user’s private profile. Sounds a lot like Facebook, no?

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I’ve been a big fan of Gowalla since January, when I signed up for the social geolocation service mostly out of curiosity. I also signed up for Foursquare around the same time, and while I used both for a while, I never really liked Foursquare and eventually stopped using it.

The biggest advantage Gowalla had over its check-in competitor was that it was actually fun. I loved getting new stamps and working toward new pins while collecting virtual items such as a longhorn or an espresso machine along the way. I posted a bunch of photos and enjoyed seeing where friends had been and what they had collected. I would go out of my way to go to new restaurants just to earn a new stamp or go back to a place because I knew they had a particular item I wanted. When I had a recent business trip to Cleveland, I purposefully chose to have a layover in Charlotte in part to earn a North Carolina pin and get closer to the “Frequent Flyer” and “Fly Like an Eagle” pins. With Gowalla, there was an incentive to discover new places, go where I’ve never been, and share my experiences in the process. Which was the core concept of the service; it was meant to be more of a digital passport and virtual scavenger hunt than a simple check-in service that catered to the bar crowd like Foursquare.

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I’m thinking about quitting Twitter. Along with any other social network I’m on. And no, I’m not joking.

Of course, I know I won’t. But maybe I need some time away, an extended break from that online world that may or may not be reality.

Truth be told, I’ve been struggling lately. I touched on some of it in my last post, but honestly, that’s just barely scratching the surface. I feel like I need to talk about it or at least vent some of my frustration, but Twitter isn’t the place to do that. And really this blog isn’t either. So I’ve been kinda quiet lately, not wanting to say something online that I’ll regret or that could be misinterpreted.

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