With web apps, speed matters a lot. The easier an activity is, the more people will do it.
Fast is a big part of easy.
With these principals in mind, here at the TNW SF labs we set out to discover which was the fastest geolocation app to check in with at a particular moment in time, under similarly shoddy ATT connected conditions.
The contenders: Foursquare, Gowalla, Buzzd, PlacePop, Brightkite, Check.in, Burbn, Scvngr, Whrrl, Rummble, and MyTown.
Here were the ground rules:
We assumed a super user – a user that knew exactly how to use each app, and didn’t have to wait for a page to load completely to jump to the proper screen. With some apps, this was harder than it sounds. For example, it took me literally a few minutes to figure out how to refresh my Rummble nearby view which had cached my previous location in Amsterdam (clicking the protractor icon and then clicking “smart sort” does the trick), and I had to battle through several pitch pages on MyTown and Whrrl.
We also chose the first venue in any nearby queue, and didn’t deal with any problems in finding the actual venue – which is typically a big problem for many of these apps. So in reality, the numbers you see below represent an absolute fastest case scenario.
We also turned off wifi and used a five bar (chuckle) AT&T 3G connection.
We started the clock upon tapping the app icon (we didn’t count time spent looking for the app).
A couple of observations before getting to the numbers:
Foursquare was having problems today. They crashed a number of times but we kept giving them another chance, because, well they’re Foursquare.
Buzzd also crashed repeatedly when we tried to Buzz a place (the equivalent of a checkin).
HTML5 app Burbn felt slow, but in actuality wasn’t that slow. Something about waiting for a browser window to load feels slower than a native app.
Far and away the fastest app we tested from launch to checkin was PlacePop. Here were the rankings:
The geo apps have a long way to go before making checking in easy / fast. We’ll recreate this experiment from time to time to see how these products are coming along.
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sorry folks, buzzd is amidst a major systems overhaul that will be complete in 2 weeks. we’ve noticed it’s giving our users fickle behavior and we apologize for that! try again at end of the month and we should be rockin …
Nihal, yeah, I use Buzzd quite a bit and I’ve found it to be consistently fast and stable. Friday was an aberration from the norm.
Hi. This is Adam Jackson with Brightkite. I wanted to add a valid (but snarky) comment to the speed of our Check.In service.
We support Brightkite, Foursquare, Gowalla and Whrrl on Check.in and we’re adding more services all of the time.
With that said, 30 seconds may sound like a long time to launch an app, search and check in but, considering you’re checking in to 4 services at once, that’s only 7.5 seconds per check in which is faster than any other app.
Doing the math, using all four of those services separately, based on your tests, would take 80.1 seconds. Assuming, most users check in on an average of 5 times per day, that’s over 6 and a half minutes per day of checking in.
With check.in, that same operation over the course of a day takes 2 and a half minutes per day.
Sure, our match is a very specific case but we just wanted to add that if you are using multiple services, we save you time and time = money!
Have a good week.
Why didn’t you test WHERE’s Check-In feature? I’d be interested in knowing how quickly it performs against these other apps, especially Foursquare and Gowalla.
TWENTY seconds (!!!) :)
Thanks for including Whrrl in the mix, Lawrence. I’m glad to see we didn’t have any crashes. We’re working on performance to increase check-in speed. Would love any other feedback you have about your experience with Whrrl. You can email me at jeanna@pelago.com, or our team at feedback@whrrl.com
Jeanna Barrett
Whrrl Community Manager
Was this on iPhone? I’d be interested to see a similar comparison on Android.
Adam, yeah that came up during the trials. You guys are checking in to multiple services… extra credit!
Thanks Lawrence. 1,000 Internet points to me. :)
Hi Lawrence, Buzzd launched a new version last week with speed improvements throughout our systems. Our new “express buzz” feature – which allows you to rate / check-in from the list of nearby places – takes you from launch to post in ~17s.