Over the last 6 months we’ve been working on something very, very special.

Without further ado, I’m stoked to announce Gowalla 3, the most significant update to the service we’ve ever released—both in terms of design and utility. But before I dive into the specifics of new features, let’s dive straight into the feature that is sure to be the most talked about.

Gowalla is now the easiest and best way to keep up with your friends across services with a combined activity tab that merges the whereabouts of your Gowalla, Facebook and Foursquare friends. Additionally, Gowalla now supports checking in on both Facebook Places and Foursquare in addition to sharing with both Twitter and Tumblr.

In fact, we’ve made checking in at your favorite places even easier with a new, faster check-in interface. We debated calling this “quick” or “express” check in, but it doesn’t really need a gimmicky name. We just made it better. Simply tap the Check In button that is universally present in the tab bar and based on your previous history and current location, we’ll auto-fill where we think you are. We get it right about 80 percent of the time. In the cases where our best guess was a little off, it’s super easy to select the correct location with a couple quick taps. Then you can quickly and easily share where you are with your friends on Gowalla, Facebook, Twitter, Foursquare and Tumblr.

Of course, one of the things we hear often from our community is how much they love the Gowalla experience—which is certainly evidenced by our recent announcement with Disney Parks—but they want to keep up with their friends on Foursquare and Facebook Places as well. We decided that this was a problem we could solve.

Today you can now connect both your Facebook and Foursquare accounts in order to keep up with friends across multiple services. We’ve combined them all into a single, connected activity feed with all your friends, regardless of the service they checked in on.

In addition to adding your friends’ Facebook and Foursquare check-ins to your activity feed, we’ve also made it easier to preview the photos your friends are taking with Gowalla on the fly. It’s a lot more fun.

Of course, we’ve added several new and improved features to Gowalla 3 as well.

You’ll notice that our Highlights feature is now baked into Spots pages on the iPhone. You can view the Highlights that have been added to a spot in addition to adding your own. And in addition to our own Highlights, you can even read tips from Foursquare if they’re present at that location.

Next, we’ve added a fantastic new feature called Bookmarks. You can use a bookmark to flag a favorite spot — or perhaps just a spot you wish to visit in the future. You can quickly pull back up your bookmarked spots from the Spots tab. We even use bookmarks to help us determine where you are when you use the improved check in feature. We think you’ll find this very handy.

Finally, I’d like to tell you about my favorite feature. It’s called Notes.

With Gowalla 3 you can leave a Note for a specific friend (or for yourself) at any location. They’ll receive it the next time they check in there. Use it to leave a menu recommendation (the queso will make you feel alive!), to welcome someone to your city, as a reminder for yourself (don’t forget the bottle of wine) or even to leave a love note for someone special.

You can leave a Note at any spot from the mobile app and also from the web as well.

This is just the highlight reel of what you’ll find in Gowalla 3. A refreshing design, better spot creation and management tools, and improved friend management features are also neatly tucked into this update.

You can download Gowalla 3 for iPhone today at iTunes. Gowalla 3 for Android, iPad and Blackberry are coming soon!

We hope you enjoy it. Grab Gowalla 3 at iTunes now!