Gowalla checkin API for developers

The cupboard-dwelling nerd in me was genuinely excited to read about location-based social networking platform Gowalla making their checkin API available to third party developers using OAuth.

I found this particularly encouraging, since it significantly increases Gowalla's chances of gaining traction in the market, given Facebook's plans to add location-based services to its feature-set a couple of months ago. This is extremely important, if we are to avoid the space being monopolised by a single leviathan platform.