Over the past year there has been lot of talk about Geolocation mobile services Foursquare and Gowalla. There are more players in this space but these 2 hold a majority of the location market.
A recent report by RJMetrics compared the services via their API data.
Some key facts to note:
- Foursquare now has just over 1.9 Million users.
Gowalla has around 340,000.
- Foursquare should pass 2 Million users within a week.
- Foursquare is adding almost 10 times more users per day than Gowalla
- At the moment Foursquare has around 5.6 Million venues and Gowalla has 1.4 Million venues.
- 1 in 3 venues on Foursquare have been only been checked into once. That number is 1 in 4 on Gowalla.
- The most popular venue name is ‘Home’ and ‘Office’, followed by fast food chains like McDonald’s.
- On Foursquare, men outnumber women almost 2-to-1.
- Over the past month Foursquare has averaged 12,900 new users per day while Gowalla only 1,370. This is a ratio of approximately 10-1.
- On Foursquare 64% of users are male, 33% are female, and 3% did not specify. 55% of users have a photo. 28% of users have linked their profile to their Facebook account.
- On Gowalla 38% of users have linked their account to their Facebook account and 53% have linked to their Twitter account. 57% of users have no friends, 13% have only one friend.
- On Foursquare 18% of venues have at least one ‘tip’, 3% of venues offer specials to people checking-in. The 2 most common places people check in are the home and office.
While they are both fast growing mobile services, Foursquare is the clear leader growing at a much faster rate and is now 5 times bigger than Gowalla.
Regardless Gowalla is still a popular service with a unique user base and content.
![lg share en Foursquare v Gowalla [FACTS]](http://s7.addthis.com/static/btn/v2/lg-share-en.gif "Foursquare v Gowalla [FACTS]"){kind=small}
![Foursquare v Gowalla [FACTS]](http://1.gravatar.com/avatar/fc9352ee2aa65068c9b87fcd40698a9d?s=100&d=&r=G "Foursquare v Gowalla [FACTS]"){kind=avatar}
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My name is David Cowling and I am the Founder and Chief Editor of Social Media News AUS. I am based in Surry Hills, Sydney - and enjoy commenting on the Social Media landscape in Australia and also major developments worldwide. Feel free to get in 
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I used to use both but find that Foursquare definitely dominates in Australia (Sydney at least). That and Foursquare’s tips and promotions features beat Gowalla’s prettier UI.