This post is similar to the Foursquare Checkins for the World Cup in terms of content and purpose. The only real difference is that it looks at a different service. Gowalla is popular with a number of people in the US and elsewhere because it allows users to upload pictures to the location page and allows friends to easily comment in reply to people who are at that location. It just doesn’t have as many total users as Foursquare. I thought it would be interesting to track the differences in checkins on Gowalla as they appear to cater to a different type of user than Foursquare. This leads to a question of if and how the checkin patterns between the services will differ? (They do appear to after the first set of games as the total checkins are the same.) Gowalla is different than Foursquare in that you can retrospectively go in and get by date data so long as you get it in the past 30 days. Foursquare requires manually getting this information every day. Also worth noting, it looks like Gowalla also updated their World Cup venues to merge duplicate locations. This was done some time between June 7 and June 12, 2010. As a researcher, I find this less problematic than Foursquare because of how Gowalla shows its checkins. Either way, as I can see by date checkins, it doesn’t effect historical checkins.
Below are the tables for total checkins and raw data.
Total and Average Checkins
| Totals | Total Checkins | Average Checkins | Grounds |
| South Africa | 2 | 2 | Soccer City Soccer Stadium |
| Mexico | 2 | 2 | Soccer City Soccer Stadium |
| Uruguay | 2 | 2 | Green Point Stadium |
| France | 2 | 2 | Green Point Stadium |
Raw Data
| Facility | Name | Link | Date checked | Checkins | Date | Team 1 | Team 2 |
| Soccer City | Soccer City | gowalla.com/spots/653944 | 12-Jun-10 | 2 | 11-Jun-10 | South Africa | Mexico |
| Cape Town Stadium | Cape Town Stadium | gowalla.com/spots/127362 | 12-Jun-10 | 2 | 11-Jun-10 | Uruguay | France |