Gowalla is a free, social, mobile, geo-location service that lets you virtually check in to different locations and leave comments about your experiences for your friends and other Gowalla users. It's available on the Apple iPhone and iPad/iPad 2, Android devices, BlackBerries, and Palm mobile devices (webOS). You can use Gowalla to search for nearby places, such as parks, restaurants, and boutiques, when you don't have a particular location in mind. Imagine you have time to kill before an appointment and want to find a coffee shop or book store. Gowalla can suggest results based on your actual location, tell you how far away they are, and show comments other users have written about those places.

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If it sounds a lot like Foursquare (4 stars, free), Facebook Places, or Google Latitude (3.5 stars, free), that's because it is. But where Foursquare is relatively clear-cut, Gowalla confuses the heck out of me. It's puzzling to figure out how to do what you think you want to do, and even more befuddling to figure out what particular buttons are supposed to do. The mobile app's interface is visually clean, but in terms of usability, it isn't intuitive. Plus, to take advantage of some of the most important features, like creating trips, you have to leave your app and go to a web site. Un-iconic icons—images that are supposed to stand for something, but it's not immediately and apparently clear what—cause frustration, and incorrectly tagged places (Touro College turns up under Parks and Recreation, for example) and duplicate business listings only add to the problem.

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Getting Started
To set up a Gowalla account, download the free app and enter an e-mail address as a user name and create a password. Alternatively, you can sign up using your Facebook ID. Next, you'll want to connect to your friends who are already on Gowalla, and you can do so by searching your Facebook, Twitter, and Gmail connections, or your local address book. You can also perform a text search for a user.

Once you've signed in and set up, you'll land on a page that shows your most recent check-in, as well as your friends' latest activities. When you check in to a venue, you can share it by posting it to Facebook, Twitter, Foursqaure, and Tumblr, letting your friends know where you are even if they're not logged into Gowalla, too. Within the app, you can see more precisely where your connected friends are or where they have been. For example, I could see that a co-worker had visited a museum not long ago. Someone else I know is apparently on a trip to California—she attached a photo of a business lunch meeting with her check-in and noted who was dining with her.

When Gowalla users virtually "check in" to a location, their account saves the activity so you have a log of the places you've been. You don't have to tell anyone at the location that you're checking in (it's not like checking in to a hotel where you have a reservation), although the information is publicly available for other Gowalla users to see once you log it.

Exploration
While setup is relatively simple, the moment you start exploring what the app has to offer, Gowalla becomes overwhelming. Too many basic buttons change from screen to screen, making it difficult to keep track of what each one does.

The main navigation bar sits on the lower part of the screen, and that stays the same, left to right: Activity, Spots, Check in, Trips, and Passport. A secondary navigation bar decorates the top of the screen, but the buttons here change for every tab you select from the bottom. For example, on Activity, the choices are All Friends, Nearby, and Requests. But the options on Spots are Nearby, Featured, and Bookmarked, in that order. Wouldn't it have made sense to at least put Nearby in a consistent place, either as the first or second option? Neither Check in nor Trips has a top nav at all, and Passport's looks like this: Profile, Activity, and Highlights. If you've managed to keep track of all those options, perhaps you noticed that on Passport there are now two different buttons called "Activity," one on the lower nav bar and one up top. Have you lost track of all the permutations yet? Oh wait, there's more.

A bullet list icon in the upper left corner appears on Activity, Spots, and Trips. In the first tab, it offers display options. In the latter two tabs, it morphs into a filter tool, letting you select the type of venue or type of trip you're interested in finding.