Since the launch of our new Spot pages last week, we’ve been working on new Passport pages alongside our soon-to-be-released iPhone and Android updates. These updates will foretell some of the updates we will be making over the next month to Items. As many of you know, Items are one of our most loved—and also most misunderstood—features. They were born out of a quirky desire to see if people would collect beautiful little icons based on the places that they travel.

Some of the items have real value attached to them, whether free basketball tickets, Lomography cameras or the highly-sought-after Flynn’s Arcade Coin at Disney’s California Adventure.

But its no secret that oftentimes our items have left people wondering… “WTF?”

So it’s time for us to make them easier to understand and more valuable to the folks who take the time to find them. Without going into all the juicy details, I do want to let you know about a few of the changes that are forthcoming.

First, we will be getting rid of “the vault” as well as the limit on how many items you can have at any given time. Instead we’ll lump them all together. They’ll simply be your collection. To keep things manageable for folks with a lot of items, we’ll let you archive items you aren’t actively using, but you’ll be able to move items in and out of that archive whenever you wish. Initially we’ll put all of the items currently in your vault into this new archived state.

Second, when you check in and receive an item we will no longer automatically place it in your collection. You will need to add it from your check-in receipt if you want to keep it. If not, it will be dismissed when you’re done viewing the receipt. Hopefully we’ll do a better job of keeping unwanted items off the street this way.

Finally, in the future we’re pondering on a plan for you to be able to add an item to a note that you leave for a friend. Of course you can imagine a variety of opportunities this might open up.

There are a few more changes and improvements we have in store, but these will be the most obviously apparent ones when we roll out these updates.

I should note that the next release of Gowalla for iPhone has moved items from a tab on the Spot and Passport pages to a table cell below. This will not be their final location, rather a transitional step. So don’t freak out that we moved the tab. :)