Thanks to our teammate Bill Piel’s swift work and Sam’s urging, we started pulling Gowalla data about 24 hours ago. Its inclusion is reflected at the top of SocialGreat.com right next to our other feeds: Twitter hashtag, Brightkite, Foursquare, and GraffitiGeo. In that 24 hour period, 12/14 7pm to 12/15 7pm, the the total Gowalla stream that we saw encompassed 14,838 checkins. Assuming Gowalla has 50,000 users, that’s an average .3 checkins per registered (not active) user during the period. To be clear, if all systems are working correctly, we should be seeing all Gowalla checkins, anonymized.
I emailed with Scott Raymond from Gowalla Inc. , he said they saw 28,000 checkins during the period; we’re working to try and figure out if SocialGreat missed part of the stream or if the bug is with Gowalla’s logs.
Our FourSquare data is just a sample; Foursquare does not have a feed of all checkins, so we’ve built a panel. Further, the first time we see a user is when he/she checks in, so we can’t estimate the active vs. inactive portion of the user base. This makes it impossible to gauge our complete sample size (active + inactive users) and prevents an apples-to-apples gross up to the current user base size that Techcrunch estimates (150,000).
With that said, our FourSquare sample of indeterminant size produced 10,188 checkins from 5,357 unique users during the same period. The only direct conclusion that can be made is that a user that is active during a 24 hour period on average makes 1.9 checkins.
- On a highly speculative basis, if 15% of the Foursquare user base as estimated by TC (22,500) is active during a 24 hour period, I would expect the total FourSquare stream to be roughly 42,750 checkins.
- At 20% active, the checkin count would be 57,000.
- Feel free to try your own numbers…
The strongest conclusion that can be drawn is that it is indeed early days of these services, and the order of magnitude of usage we are seeing is thousands and tens of thousands, as opposed to hundreds of thousands and millions. With that said, from small seeds grow mighty oaks.
