Shawn Blanc imagines that the experience of using a social app like Gowalla improves as more people you know become users:
Perhaps part of Gowalla’s usefulness being lost on me has to do with the fact that I only have a handful of friends with iPhones, and of them, only a couple were nerdy enough to sign up for it.
I can confirm that he’s right from first-hand experience. I live in a town of 4,000 people. Some of them use iPhones, and even fewer use apps like Gowalla. In fact, I’ve never met most of the Gowalla users I follow and they all live hundreds of miles away.
However, when I was in San Francisco for Macworld Expo, the experience was entirely different. Gowalla became a useful way to find the people I intended to meet up with. If I hadn’t had that experience, I wouldn’t see it as anything other than a fun but ultimately useless toy.
