TightWind is written by Kyle Baxter. Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish.

Gowalla is changing focus:

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.

Interesting idea—turn all of this data that we have about where people are going and how much they like the place into relevant guides to where people should visit when traveling. There’s going to be a lot more of this kind of stuff, where we’re creating higher level knowledge based on the mountains of data we’re creating every day.