At the beginning of the month, travel and check-in service Gowalla was acquired by Facebook. That sounded like a good deal for both companies, considering Gowalla never got past its second billing to foursquare, and Facebook really needed great mobile developers.

But what about its over one million users? With Gowalla shutting its doors at the end of January, one company called TouristEye decided to allow all of that data to be imported into its own system. Pretty smart, considering that even if it gets a quarter of Gowalla’s user base, that would be a massive lift for the travel service.

TouristEye allows Gowalla users to seamlessly migrate their check-in history, and the service promises to automatically complete their Passports and create all the trips they’ve done in the past in an “intelligent way”. If you’re a diehard Gowalla user, this is an absolute no-brainer for you. So far, the company says that “thousands” have migrated their accounts so far.

Easy migration

TouristEye has set up a migration page, that allows you to log in with your Gowalla account and import your data to its service. While I’m not a big-time Gowalla user, I do have some check-in data from the past two years that I wouldn’t mind having somewhere, even if I’m not going to use it.

As an example, you can see Gary Arndt’s profile, who while using Gowalla, visited more than 100 countries. The migration looks clean, and I’m sure that Arndt is happy that all of that information isn’t lost forever:

Unfortunately, TouristEye isn’t the same type of service as Gowalla is, in that it’s not about check-ins. The service is a place for recommending locations for trips based on places you’ve been. While you’ll get a nice looking profile out of the deal, you won’t get the same social features as Gowalla offered.

If you’re bummed about Gowalla going away into Facebook land, this is at least one way to not have all of that hard work and diligent check-ins vanish into thin air.

➤ TouristEye

What the headline says, basically, according to two sources. That and multiple sources are telling me that a majority of Gowalla investors were cool with the deal being entirely in Facebook shares, because those are likely to be more profitable moving forward — as Facebook approaches IPO.

Other sources are saying that the “Investors vs. Founders” sentiment isn’t a reflection of the majority of Gowalla investors (Jason Calacanis wrote an entire blog post about this) and that the deal was done with full board backing. The team, many of which will not be moving on to Facebook, did not get a significantly better deal than investors I’m hearing.

During an interview at LeWeb, joint Gowalla investors Sean Parker and Shervin Pishevar went on the record saying that they were happy about the Gowalla deal, especially Parker, who already owns a lot of Facebook shares, obviously. “We’re both happy,” said Pishevar. “It’s a great outcome for Josh, as he was in a difficult and very competitive space against Foursquare.”

While he wouldn’t comment on any deal specifics, Gowalla founder Josh Williams told me in an email, “I am truly excited about moving forward. We’re going to build some awesome things in the days ahead.”

And we will likely be covering them. Woot.

Gowalla, the geo-social app, will soon be no more. The founders will be joining Facebook and shutting down the product a couple months after trying to reposition the app as a social travel guide. It was clear long ago that its rival Foursquare won the check-in wars, passing one billion check-ins recently and more than 10 million users. But why did it turn out this way?

Both Foursquare and Gowalla launched at the 2009 SXSW conference, and many people thought Gowalla was actually better designed. At least it looked better, with more whimsical badges, for instance. But pretty doesn’t always win. “Startups and businesses are like making wine,” says Gowalla investor (and vinophile) Gary Vaynerchuk, “it is a blend. It is not about one element. Design is one element.”

Another Gowalla investor explains the difference in one word: “Austin.” Gowalla was headquartered in Austin and Foursquare is based in New York. For a mobile social app that depended on urban density to gain early critical mass, New York gave Foursquare a hometown advantage over Gowalla.

Foursquare was able to build better network effects early on, and those just kept compounding. You don’t use Foursquare because it is a pretty app. You use it because all your friends use it, and because it is the geo-location platform across many apps. It is more useful because it touches more people and more apps that people care about.

The other thing about Foursquare is that it didn’t try to overcomplicate things early on. It did one thing very well: check-ins and rewards. Over time it added local recommendations and even pushed into city guides, but it remains mostly about the check-in. That’s what keeps people coming back to the app day-in and day-out.

Foursquare also has Dennis Crowley as a founder. Crowley has been obsessed with the idea of mobile social geo-location apps for a decade (he tried this once before and failed with Dodgeball). Gowalla founder Josh Williams is also very talented. “He’s the kind of guy who I would back over and over,” says Vaynerchuk, even now. But again, that founder’s talent is just one element.

It’s not just the founder who counts. “I think Tristan is a massively underrated character in the whole story,” says Vaynerchuk, referring to Foursquare’s business development executive Tristan Walker. “His early biz dev deals gave them a lot of clout, with major brands like Starbucks lending their brand equity to Foursquare.”

Everyone has their own opinion on why Foursquare succeeded and Gowalla didn’t. I asked why on TWitter and got a ton of feedback, Here are a few of the responses below. Add your own theories in comments:

We reported last week that social check-in and travel journal company Gowalla was acquired by social networking titan Facebook.

Today, the company confirmed the acquisition in a blog post. One major thing to note is that all of the data the company has collected on your whereabouts are not a part of the deal with Facebook. That means that deleting your Gowalla account won’t be necessary after all.

Apparently the discussions started around Facebook’s f8 event, and here’s what Gowalla co-founder and CEO Josh Williams had to say about the process:

About two months ago, my co-founder Scott and I attended F8. We were blown away by Facebook’s new developments. A few weeks later Facebook called, and it became clear that the way for our team to have the biggest impact was to work together. So we’re excited to announce that we’ll be making the journey to California to join Facebook!

Gowalla, as a service, will be winding down at the end of January. We plan to provide an easy way to export your Passport data, your Stamp and Pin data (along with your legacy Item data), and your photos as well. Facebook is not acquiring Gowalla’s user data.

The Gowalla team will be working specifically on the Facebook Timeline product, clearly coming in with a keen eye on mobile design.

Facebook has acquired location-based startup Gowalla, according to a report this evening by Laurie Segall on CNN Money. The terms of the deal haven’t been reported, and Gowalla declined to comment. Facebook says it doesn’t comment on rumor and speculation. Update: We’ve heard from an independent source that Facebook is indeed acquiring Gowalla.

According to CNN’s report, the Gowalla team will be working on Facebook Timeline, with most of the team moving to Facebook’s Palo Alto headquarters and some remaining in Gowalla’s hometown of Austin, where Facebook has an office as well.

Gowalla, which has raised $10.4 million to date, first launched at SXSW 2009 — going head-to-head against Foursquare, with a stronger emphasis on virtual goods (and nicer icons) than their competitor. But Foursquare overtook Gowalla in popularity by a large margin, prompting the startup to reinvent itself earlier this year.

The new product moves away from displaying a time-based feed of your friends’ recent check-ins, and focuses instead on creating Stories around the places you and your friends have visited, clustering together photos that show off your adventures (there is also a Guides section that lays out where you should visit in a given city).

In other words, it’s not too dissimilar to Facebook’s Timeline feature, which is also designed to group clusters of activity into more cohesive stories, as opposed to just a reverse-chronological feed. And it would make perfect sense for Facebook to start featuring location checkins and photos tagged with GPS coordinates into Timeline stories.

According to CNN, the fate of Gowalla’s existing app is as of yet undecided. It’s also unclear whether this is an ‘acqui-hire’, or if Facebook is also interested in any of Gowalla’s technology. My hunch is that it’s the former.

Gowalla doesn’t hide the ability to delete your account, but they don’t necessarily make it obvious either.

We’ve learned today that the social networking behemoth Facebook has purchased Gowalla, the somewhat second-fiddle check-in service to foursquare.

The app has always been brilliantly designed, so it’s a great move by Facebook. If you think the social network has enough of your data already though, you might want to delete your Gowalla account so they don’t get any more of it.

Log in via Gowalla’s website, click Settings, and then choose “Delete Account” in the bottom left.

Gowalla’s GetSatisfaction page suggests that you also email them at live@gowalla.com to make sure the deletion goes through.

So there you have it. If you don’t want Facebook to have all of your Gowalla check-in information, you better delete your account pretty quickly.

iPhone/Android: Banjo is either an amazing app or a really creepy one, depending on how you look at it. The app finds your Facebook, Twitter, Foursquare, and Gowalla contacts, puts them on a map, and pings you when they're nearby. More »

There are a lot of social check-in apps out there. We know that FourSquare, Facebook, and Gowalla are the heavy hitters. There are some niche apps trying to steal a bit of the market with small twists and features. Some of them are even using FourSquare’s API.

crowdmug for iOS is doing just that, by showing you pictures and video in real-time from venues you might be interested in going to. It would also like you to post pictures of places around you, and you could actually earn some money from the community when you do it.

Take a photo, leave a photo

For example, if you’re at a restaurant, just take a picture or video with crowdmug, add the location, which is powered by FourSquare, and you’re done. The next time someone looks for places close to them, they might see what you posted. If it looks crowded, maybe they won’t go at all.

It’s an interesting twist on location and media sharing.

Earn some money

This feature got our attention. If someone in the community really wants to see what a place looks like through a picture or video, they can submit a request and put a dollar amount to how much they’re willing to pay for the community to do deliver it to them.

If you’re paying for a photo you can make a deposit to the app in any amount using a credit card. If you’ve gotten paid for taking photos, you can ‘cash out’ using Paypal, or by receiving a check.

The only thing I’ve thought of that makes sense for this feature is if you’re apartment hunting and you’re out of town. Perhaps someone can go for you, take a picture or shoot a walkthrough video for you. I’m not sure how much that’s worth though, and we suppose that crowdmug is willing to find out.

Here is a video demo of crowdmug:

You can follow cities, and check out all of the media being shared in real-time if you like. Say you’re homesick to see Philadelphia, perhaps you could check in and hope that people are posting things. There’s not a lot of content yet, as the app hasn’t gotten a lot of traction as of yet. crowdmug promises that an Android version is coming soon. It’s going to take a pretty good sized userbase to get crowdmug off of the ground.

A couple weeks ago during TechCrunch Disrupt, Gowalla co-founder and CEO Josh Williams took the stage to preview the latest version of his service. And while it is technically called Gowalla 4.0, as Williams showed, it’s really a total revamp away from the check-in space and towards the travel and location-based story space. But as good as Williams and myself may have been at describing it, you should really try it out for yourself. And now you can.

The Gowalla 4.0 apps for iOS and Android have just gone live in their respective stores. The website has also been completely revamped to focus on the new details of the service.

“So I said to myself: Self, let’s launch this thing on Thursday, Sep 22. Because no one else will be doing anything interesting on that day,” Williams joked earlier on Twitter. He’s of course referring to the massive conference about to take place during which the largest social network in the world is supposed to unveil some “game-changing” stuff. The idea is to release bad news today in the hope that it’s buried, not good news.

But the truth is that Gowalla has been pushing to get the new product out the door. And now here it is.

Update: Williams has more to say in his own post.

The location wars had a number of casualties. Some companies shut down, some sold off their remaining tech and talent. Others are still out there plugging away, but at this point, it seems clear that Foursquare won the all-important battle over the check-in. Even Facebook is slowly backing away from that particular space. Now the fun can really begin.

For a number of months, Gowalla was seen as the main competitor to Foursquare. Both launched at SXSW in 2009 and both got quick traction as check-in services. But Gowalla was always trying to do more. Their experience came from the virtual goods side of things, and they tried to weave that into the location space. But it never really worked. Perhaps they were trying to do too much in the nascent space.

Several months ago, the team sat down to dream it all up again. They thought about what kind of location-based app they would build today if they were starting from scratch. Then they went out and did just that. The result is the new Gowalla, which co-founder Josh Williams is showing off today at TechCrunch Disrupt.

Technically version 4.0, the new version bears little resemblance to the previous versions of the app. Gowalla is no longer predominantly a check-in service. That’s still one aspect of it, but the idea is now to focus on two key areas: travel and storytelling.

When you load up Gowalla, the first thing you see is still a main activity feed. Here you’ll find the activity from your friends. Because Gowalla isn’t completely pivoting away from their core location functionality, much of the data and social connections remain intact. But instead of a stream of check-ins, you’ll notice people hanging out together. They’re checking-in, but they’re also taking pictures and talking to one another in clusters that are known as “Stories”.

The main middle tab is now “Guides”. Here you’ll find curated travel guides for various places around the world. For example, if you load up the app in San Francisco, you’ll see the San Francisco guide, as well as the East Bay guide and the Stanford guide. You can quickly scroll through other guides not near you as well. And Gowalla has the ability to make special guides on the fly. For example, they made a TC Disrupt guide for event-goers.

Clicking on these guides loads up a bit of information about the city as well as all of the must-see spots. Again, because Gowalla has years worth of location data, they’re able to easily populate robust guides. Some of the locations are curated, some are based on check-in data and people favoriting places. The Gowalla “Highlights” feature also plays a role here.

The final tab is your personal profile area. Here you’ll find all of your pictures and all of your Stories.

So will this small pivot work for Gowalla? Well, they’re certainly focusing on the right areas. Check-ins are now a commodity, the real value of location lies in both augmenting personal experiences and providing useful information. Gowalla is trying to find the sweet spot between both. They’re a mobile travel guide and a well-conceived location-based sharing tool.

Color, for all its faults, was trying to do something interesting around location-based sharing. This new version of Gowalla is doing something similar, but in a much more straightforward manner. You and all of your friends can take pictures at an event, cluster them together around location, and the UI to do so is obvious.

You can also share all of this data to Facebook and Twitter — and yes, you can still check-in through Gowalla and send it to Foursquare.

The travel aspect is potentially even bigger. While there are a lot of people going after this problem, no one has nailed the mobile travel guide so far. When someone does, it’s going to be massive. Gowalla has a pretty decent shot of doing something unique here because of all the data they’ve been collecting over time.

Gowalla also has some key partnerships with Disney for these travel guides. Other launch partners include National Geographic and several major U.S. universities. Gowalla will feature guides for around 60 major metropolitan areas around the world at launch.

The company has built apps for Android and iOS, and they have a web experience as well. All of them should be out shortly.

We’ll see if Gowalla can do more this time beyond building a beautiful-looking app. But all of this new stuff sounds about right to me.

Click to view slideshow.