Gowalla checkin API for developers

The cupboard-dwelling nerd in me was genuinely excited to read about location-based social networking platform Gowalla making their checkin API available to third party developers using OAuth.

I found this particularly encouraging, since it significantly increases Gowalla’s chances of gaining traction in the market, given Facebook’s plans to add location-based services to its feature-set a couple of months ago. This is extremely important, if we are to avoid the space being monopolised by a single leviathan platform.

Location-based services have yet to find the kind of audience that the rest of the social networking world currently enjoys, with only about 4% of the adult internet population using them regularly.

I’ve always been a little skeptical of the potential for services like Gowalla and Foursquare to become part of the average consumer’s social routine, but once these services become integrated with other more ubiquitous platforms, they can begin to add real value to the user experience.

Once this happens, integration with location based social networking services will become a realistic prospect to more than just big players such as Starbucks and Nike, and worthy of marketing R&D budgets for anyone with bricks and mortar presence in the real world.