Otter🔗

The Lost Magic of Gowalla🔗

Before it was swallowed up by Facebook, one of my all-time favorite apps was Gowalla. If you’re not familiar, Gowalla billed itself a “location-based” social-networking service. Much like others at the time (e.g. FourSquare), you checked into places.

Foursquare gave you badges, and rewarded you for showing up at the same place over and over again. Gowalla gave you stickers, and you got different stickers for the different places you went to. Much credit to the Gowalla design team who must have worked their asses off because you had unique stickers for all sorts of places: landmarks, parks, buildings, etc.. ).

Insomuch as Gowalla was a social-networking service, it was equally enjoyable to “play” the game solo. I was so enamored with the idea of finding new stickers that I would walk to out of the way parks or taking long treks to coffee shops in other nabes. Gowalla had an enchanting, visually delightful philosophy: treating your physical journeys like a passport, stamping it with custom-crafted collectible stickers, and celebrating the simple joy of visiting places.

When I left Priceline, I found myself spending days exploring local coffee shops across my neighborhood and surrounding boroughs. In any of these visits, I was missing something tactile: a reminder of each visit, a place to jot down quick impressions, and a way to see all the places I’ve been to.

So I started building Otter (“Out there”), just for myself to recapture some of the magic of the experience I had with Gowalla. Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery because it pales in comparison to the original, but it’s fun to try.

On-Device AI for Individuality🔗

As I mentioned, one of the best things about Gowalla was its ability to give you a sense of the unqiue with its large corpus of stickers, especially for every day places and custom landmarks.

I, who is not running a real company or have a real design team, am trying to see if the approach of combining or generating images on-device can create a compelling experience. Imagine a coffee with a sombrero for a mexican cafe, or a barbell with moon for a 24-hour gym.

Apple has Memoji and Google introduced Emoji Kitchen, so this seems very doable at the local level.

Zero-Cost Geospatial Infrastructure via OpenStreetMap🔗

Given how far the OpenStreetMap (OSM) universe has come, it’s hard to justify paying for Google or Apple Maps without good reaason. I built Otter in part to see how far I could stretch it**.**

Otter relies strictly on self-hosted Protomaps tiles with on-device rendering of vector data. I use a lightweight proxied Overpass API to locate independent coffee shops, roasters, and third places without overloading generous downstream services