Yesterday we turned the page on a new chapter for Gowalla. For our fans keeping score out there, the reaction has ranged from “The new Gowalla is the best thing ever!” to “I absolutely and utterly hate the new Gowalla with a passion reserved for spammers and ambulance chasers!” I’m happy to say that the positive refrain has far outweighed the negative, but I wanted to take a moment one day in to follow up on the launch and provide a bit more personal color on what we believe is a truly delightful leap forward for Gowalla.

Gowalla was born out of desire to inspire, well… ourselves, really, to go out and explore the world through the eyes of others. It’s led us to make friends in the far corners of the globe and on a personal level has brought me an incredible amount of joy as I’ve gotten to know many of you — our fans — over the past couple of years. It blows my mind to open up our new Guide to Mecca and find so many people using Gowalla to share the places they love.

We began the process of creating the new Gowalla about 5 or 6 months ago. In the grand schemes of things, that’s a short period of time. We’re still a smallish, 30-person team, and coordinating the development of mobile apps for iPhone and Android, along with an entirely new website, was a challenge. It’s a lot of moving parts, and the talented people I get to work with every day deserve a hearty slow clap for their tireless work over the past several months. I simply cannot say enough great things about the team I work with.

It’s been difficult working on much of this project in silence, and I can’t tell you how wonderful it is to have it out in the wild. As some of you know, there have been a few bumps (like a crashy app on iOS 4.2 and some bugs that were preventing folks from logging into our new website). We’ve been working quickly to sweep up any dust and clear out any cobwebs. And we’re grateful for your patience along the way.

It’s important to point out that while on paper this is our 4.0 release, enough has changed with our codebase that you really could consider this a 1.0 release. And there is still a handful of features large and small that didn’t quite make it into the 1.0 release due to our schedule — but they’ll be coming quickly over the next few weeks, along with the usual performance enhancements and bug fixes.

One big feature missing from our mobile apps in 1.0 is your feed of non-story activity. This running list of loved stories, places and photos is one of my favorite things on our website. This, along with our full notifications tray, will make it into 4.1, coming soon. It’s the lifeblood of activity in Gowalla.

We also have some savvy UI improvements coming to our Guides. While we’re beyond happy with our Guides, some simple activities like search, and browsing by category and highlight are a bit more obscure than we had hoped for in our 1.0 release. This is the other place you can expect to see some deft design improvements in the days to come — both our “Nearby” and city Guides.

Speaking of our city Guides, while we launched with 60 of them, there are already more on the way. Two of my favorite cities, Raleigh and Dublin, are definitely on the list.

But we need your help!

The places you love, list and highlight, along with the places you share stories and photos at help us determine where we should create our next batch of Guides. So if you’d like to see a Gowalla Guide for your city, you can help us by adding highlights and creating lists for your city (or campus or park or… well, you get the idea!).

Along those lines, many of you reading this are part of our street team. You’ve probably no doubt noticed that most of our street team features (editing and merging our spot database, for example) are AWOL at the moment. Don’t worry, they’re coming back in the next couple of weeks too. So much time, so little to do. :)

And finally, many of you who—like us—loved collecting your items on Gowalla will recall that we said a few weeks back that we’d be opening up that data for your item collection. This is still planned and we have a couple of ideas on how we want to make this special. I’m not going to let the cat out of the bag yet, but I think you’ll like what we’re thinking up here.

Thank you for all of your incredible enthusiasm and feedback for our product. We never imagined the fabulous response we’ve received. I’m already so stoked about seeing a new batch of quite lovely stories, filled with friends and photos making their way through Gowalla. Please keep sending in your feedback. We’re excited to be writing this next chapter of Gowalla with you!