I don’t how the GPS can’t find me when I’m outside. Everyone keeps saying that the GPS doesn’t work accurately when inside. Fine & dandy, but I’m OUTSIDE. Not inside. I can be inside a location and Gowalla still accurately finds me with in a very, very short distance. Not miles off like foursquare has done.

There are other reasons too for liking Gowalla over foursquare that I didn’t mention, but probably should have; better overall design of site & app, ease of use, better functionality.

Thanks for the post, just wanted to clarify some things though… I think you’ll find from using any iPhone locative apps that GPS can be flaky sometimes (when inside, in cities with lots of buildings, etc). You’ll also find that geocoders (the software that turns street addresses into lat/longs can also be flaky) – sometimes the dot on a map showing a Google listing or a Yelp restaurant can be a few blocks off.

When you add a venue on foursquare, we have two locations to go off of: #1 the current location of your phone and #2 the address you give us when you add a location. Because we know the accuracy of the iPhone GPS can vary, we assume that the address you give us is more accurate (which is usually is) and then we rely on the Google geocoder to turn that address into a lat/long that we can then put on a map. If you try to add a venue without an address, we’ll just default to lat/long of the iPhone.

Neither of these approaches is fail-proof – the GPS on your phone could be a few blocks off or the Google geocoder could have a glitch that places the pin representing the street address a few blocks from where it should be – but it’s nearby impossible for the developer to predict which one is going to fail worse.

Anyway, hope that clears it up. Thanks.

- @dens
foursquare