There were too many people tweeting at me to do a response to the various intricacies of the “New Items” tweets that were sent today that I thought it better to put up a quick post.
First of all, let me make it clear that the tweets that start New Item are entirely automated and work by monitoring the “Missing Items” (see our post yesterday) section of Gowalla to see when a new item appears.
We first tweeted about a new item called Citrus Sweet Leaf Green Tea (pic) which then promptly disappeared again from the missing items list. It turns out that this is a special offer in association with Sweet Leaf Tea for those lucky enough to be in Austin for SXSW. Basically, you find the item and you can redeem it for a free can (sounds delicious but I think I’ll stick with a warm cup of PG Tips, thanks). Obviously this has been removed from the missing items list as it would be a little unfair for those that aren’t in Austin for the deal (in the same way that Golden Gifts weren’t made a part of the missing items list during the Christmas giveaways). Maybe this is the first of the “rewards” that was mentioned with the new Gowalla.com makeover?
Secondly, we tweeted about a new item called Americano (pic). “But, hang on!?!?” you all cried in joyous harmony, “that’s not a new item”. And in that you would indeed be correct but for those of you with a memory span of at least 24 hours, you’d remember that our post yesterday mentioned that Americano (amongst others) had been removed from active circulation. Well guess what kids, it looks like it’s back! But why did we tweet it? Well that comes down to when the tweeting system was put in place during our 13 Days of Christmas celebration. At this time, the Americano was removed from the missing items list and so when we did our initial crawl we didn’t have it saved. Now it’s appeared, our system went “ooo new item” and tweeted it as such. This shouldn’t happen for any future items.
In other interesting news, it looks like the Torch (pic) has gone back on to the missing items list as have all the other items. It seems it was just some sort of bug with Gowalla which has now been resolved.
