Facebook Buys Gowalla
How does Facebook keep pace in mobile with the built-for-mobile and insanely well-designed Path? Here’s one piece.
Assuming this deal is finalized — great scoop by Laurie Segall — I’m really happy for the Gowalla team. They were putting an emphasis on design and attention to detail in the mobile space well before it was the cool thing to do. And they stayed true to their roots and did it all from Austin, Texas.
Google should have scooped them up way before Facebook could. But well… Yeah.
Related: Facebook has a lot of fucking awesome design talent at their disposal now.
Update 12/5: The deal has been finalized.
“Greater Choice”
Late last night, I linked to a blog post Google put up and jotted down some initial thoughts. Given the response (thousands of views, 100+ notes, etc.), I thought it was only fair that I elaborate a bit.
Google’s post is entitled “Greater choice for wireless access point owners”. It outlines new opt-out functionality for Google’s location database. I ripped into the post — as did several others — not so much because of the feature itself, but because the post is misguided and disingenuous. In my view, it is probably the worst post Google has ever put on their blog. And that’s saying something.
First of all, this is a post that should not have been written — at least not in the way that it was. Google is building their location database using WiFi hotspots, likely including yours if you broadcast your SSID (your router’s name). Apple does the same thing. So does Skyhook (which is suing Google for ditching their location database to build their own). So do others. It’s a good idea. And it makes locations services much better.
Foursquare Radar
This is something I’ve wanted from Foursquare since about week two of using it: ambient alerts.
The biggest barrier of any app is simply the need for it to be open to be useful. This starts to move away from that.
Also: it took Apple just a week to deploy this update to all iPhone users, while Android makers are still shipping 2.2, and WP7 is a mess.
Yep. Apple needed to get an update out there fast to resolve the issue. Total time to develop and push to all users? One week.
Can you imagine what that would have been like on Android? Six months from now, the majority of users still probably wouldn’t have the update.
Latest Chromium for Mac build has location ability turned on by default. Should make it to Chrome dev channel soon, then beta. Twitter.com already smartly using it. Location continues its march.
