The location based social network has been purchased by Facebook, and as part of the deal, the service will be switched off in January 2012. Users have a small window to export their data (although what they’ll be able to do with it is unclear) before we tag Gowalla as #RIP and the management team are absorbed by Mark Zuckerberg’s behemoth network.
Josh Williams, CEO of Gowalla, writes:
We’re so very grateful for the support of our community, our investors, our families, and, of course, the City of Austin as well. You’ve all played a special role in seeing us to this day.
Once again, the users of a service are being left behind as the investors grab what’s on the table and staff are captured in an acquisition. There’s little that the users can do except hope that when the roulette wheel of the web 2.0 world stops, they’ve picked a service that will continue to grow.
The story of Gowalla and other similar services has happened before, and it will happen again.
When UK based Last.FM was bought by CBS, there were many anxious listeners in their 15 million, wondering what would happen to the service. Would licence fees change, would the rules on what could and could not be listened to alter, would CBS simply switch the service off and try to transition them to something almost, but not quite, the same?
The main deliverables from Last.FM are pretty much the same, although some of the areas have been tweaked. The users are mostly still there, and the service continues to thrive after the buyout.
The same could not be said about another darling of the UK Tech scene, Dopplr. Launched by Matt Biddulph and Matt Jones in 2007, the social network site allowed you to say when and where you were travelling, and you’d be told when you had the opportunity to meet friends around the world when you both happened to be in the same place.
For the relatively small number of users, there was a huge amount of paths crossing. Dopplr worked the data into annual travel reports, third party tools and more. I remember seeing a pre-release version from Biddulph when we bumped into each other in San Diego, and could see that the roots of something big were being laid down.
Around eighteen months after launch, Nokia bought the company, the management team shattered and drifted apart, and Dopplr simply withered and died on the Web 2.0 tree, while the users could do little but watch it stumble and fall.
So to the Gowalla users, I know it hurts. I know you feel betrayed and used. This time you were unlucky and got screwed so that the investors and management team can move on with as much as they can. ‘This is the way of Web 2.0‘ is a lousy explanation, as is ‘it was free to use, what did you expect?‘ but it’s all I can offer you.
Meanwhile, Facebook would really like you to start using Places…
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