Jonathan Carroll's dashboard

You can find items when you check-in at places, and we recommend giving them away by dropping them or swapping them at places you check-in. Also, if you like a particular item, just click on it in-app and vault it! More here: http://bit.ly/moreplz

Our hats are off to the preternatural skills demonstrated by the STE!

And so we are (working on it)! It probably did have something to do with the weirdness of pre-populating just a couple of items, of which most are in SF or Austin.

Official policy? We don't have one at the moment, on people creating their homes, which I would guess means we allow it. Really, we don't have almost any rules on spot creation, mostly that the spot be an actual place, and in the correct location.

We will be seeing more sorting tools in the future, ones which will weed out crap spots like, 'My Closet' or junk like that; we know you don't want to see useless spots like that in your feed, and we don't either.

Honestly, what happens often is people, in their initial Gowalla excitement, make their first spot at home, and later realize they didn't want that there for the wide world to check-in at their residence, and they email us asking to delete it, which we always do. We obviously don't encourage people to make spots at the places they live. However, when a person creates a spot at their own home, in accordance with the Terms of Service, it is not a violation of their privacy at all. We do not have different levels of privacy groups (such as friends only was suggested above), and we really encourage you only to create spots that you're comfortable with others knowing exist (and possibly checking-in at) and for which you'd be proud to take credit for creating.

I doubt we're going to legislate this anytime soon, but we are working to quickly eliminate these kinds of spots from preeminence by continuing to have better filtering tools. We've said before, and expect to see it implemented, that we envision a thumbs up/down voting system that will dump junk spots into a desolate waste land of unvisited spots. Sure that's not implemented today, and we definitely are working on *other* filtering options simultaneously, but we do agree that we don't want to crowd up the service with spots for people's personal homes.

Obviously we're inviting this a bit by having multiple home items, and we do debate this in the office, but in our minds, we hope more of the homes that get marked would be exception places, like the Frank Lloyd Wright homes we've tagged in Chicago and elsewhere.

Keep up the awesome work, and keep rocking Gowalla!

We'll ponder on that language. Maybe that needs to be explained better?

We actually *do* currently have a basketball court category, under Parks, Nature & Recreation. Enjoy!

Which account?

Which spot?

Trevor, which spot is it?

I looked at the pic on Flickr (it's not showing up here currently). What exactly do you mean?

We definitely understand what you mean, but making spots is part of the fun of our service! We want you simply to make spots as you are naturally there, or for others to make them when they are there.

We did debate initially on whether to pre-populate spots, but for the most part, we didn't want to do that so that there would be a fun focus on making the spots. So we ourselves try to do that as little as possible, and I don't know that we're going to turn it on at the moment, even for you awesome Street Team Elite.

Thanks for rocking Gowalla!

For spots you've created, you can edit those online. For others, you can post the changes here, and we or the Gowalla Street Team Elite will get them fixed for you!

We want you to be able to check-in at the same place multiple times in one day, but didn't want to encourage panic-pushing where you could check-in some place 50 times a day. So we chose 3 hours as the time between new check-ins at the same spot. We know it's not quite perfect, but it seems to be working so far!

You mean online, correct, not in-app?

Are you logged-in currently?

Is that for more than one spot? Or do you mean that for all of Helsingborg/Halsingbord, the spelling is wrong?

Is it simply a difference between Swedish and English, do you think?

What Lewis said is correct: you can check back in after 3 hours. And you do not actually have to check-in somewhere else first. For instance, if you sat at work all day (9 hours) you could check-in there 3 times, without having to check-in elsewhere first. So rack up those check-ins!

Sarah: shoot me an email at live {a t] gowalla dot com with your username on Gowalla. Thanks! – Jonathan Carroll, on November 19, 2009 02:56

Spot URL, name of bridge, etc. would be super-handy! – Jonathan Carroll, on November 18, 2009 16:50

This is a planned feature. Thanks for rocking Gowalla!