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This Week in Social Media

The latest hot Social Media news hitting the headlines this week, Gowalla 3 with Facebook and Foursqaure integration, the new simple file sharing service from ge.tt.

Gowalla Uses Integration to Increase Market Share

Gowalla like other services such as Loopt, Foursquare and Facebook Places is what is known as a ‘geosocial’ site. Geosocial sites allow users with GPS-enabled phones and devices to share their current location with their friends (or, for those with few privacy concerns, with the world in general). Geosocial sites still have a fairly limited market share, but they’re increasing in popularity and have the potential to follow sites like Facebook in taking a path from obscurity to prominence.

At the moment, Gowalla has only a small share of the limited geosocial market, with around 600,000 users compared to the nearly 5 million who use Foursquare, but experts are predicting that this may change with the integration features included in the latest release of Gowalla. These features allow users to check in with the activity of friends using other services such as Foursquare, Tumblr or Facebook Places and means that users no longer have to operate accounts with multiple services to keep in touch with different friends. With Gowalla 3’s ability to integrate with its competitors, users can choose to use Gowalla themselves if it’s the platform they prefer, without having to worry that their friends are using something else. Read the full article here at CNN Gowalla tries to beat Foursquare by joining it.

Worth A Mention

Ge.tt is a new, free file sharing site (though it’s doing so well that a paid version is predicted to also be available next year). It claims to provide a fast, simple means of sharing files, with no lengthy waits to upload the file which is to be shared, and no risk of the recipient’s inbox being clogged up with a large attachment. Users select the files that they want to share, then receive a link which they can share with friends who will be downloading the files. One of the key benefits of this service is that a link is much easier to share than the file itself a link can be added to a Facebook post, e-mailed to someone, or even Tweeted. Ge.tt also offers a service whereby you can track how many times your file has been downloaded. For more information or to give Ge.tt a go visit the site.

Gowalla 3 – Now Up and Running

With so many different social networking options now available, it can be hard to keep up with friends who might prefer a different site to your personal favourite. Gowalla is a location based social networking tool for iPhones, Androids and Blackberrys, which now draws together data from multiple social networking sites, including Facebook, Foursquare, Twitter and Tumblr.

The newest version of Gowalla was released on 2 December 2010, with a suite of new features to make social networking more integrated. For example, users are given a single activity feed, which draws together information on what all their friends are doing, regardless of which service (Facebook, Foursquare, etc) those friends are using. There is a new Bookmarks feature which allows users to flag favourite places, as well as a new Notes feature. The latter allows the user to leave a note (either for themselves or for a friend) which is attached to a particular place, such as a recommendation attached to a particular restaurant or a reminder to buy something attached to the local mall. Gowalla 3 for iPhones is free and available from iTunes; Gowalla 3 is not yet available for Android, iPad or Blackberry, but the new version should be available for these platforms soon.

Look out for more of our selection of the best articles hitting the headlines bought to you each week by the TUHEL.COM team. Let us know what you think, all comments welcome.