Foursquare v Gowalla [FACTS]

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.