Gowalla’s next location check-in app features city guides

Location-based check-in company Gowalla unveiled the next version of its mobile application today, which features guides that include more in-depth information about locations.

For example, users can see guides to locations such as Disneyland or the University of Texas, which highlight some of the more important or interesting sights at the theme-park or campus. The guides are professionally curated by partners or created internally by Gowalla. But Gowalla users can also participate by adding photos and fleshing out a guide for other users. As people check-in to those places in the guides, they unlock more information from the guide about the venue.

“Check-ins are a bit more of a transactional model, we wanted something that was faster and more connected and saved that memory in a way that I could share with my friends,” Gowalla founder and chief executive Josh Williams (pictured) said. “Our goal is to inspire people to get out.”

Anyone can take a photo while they are using the guide and upload an image to that guide, creating a film strip for each “story” — basically an individual’s participation — within a guide. They can tag friends in the photos, which brings them into the story.

“It helps fuel not only the guide that this story is a part of, but it creates this beautiful photo grid stories on the web,” Williams said. “All this we brought to the web, these same guides bubble up in a way that can be easily browsed from your iPad.”

Gowalla unveiled the new application at TechCrunch’s Disrupt 2011 conference in San Francisco. The next version will be launching “very soon” and will include 60 city guides created by Gowalla and 25 guides made by the company’s partners.

[Photo credit: Matthew Lynley]