Nwalla – Nigeria’s Version of Gowalla?

With so much information on the web, it is hard to find local and relevant content in one place. Thanks to location-based services such as Foursquare and Gowalla, people are now finding it easier to discover and share places, businesses and events of interest with friends.

Today, a new service called Nwalla that attempts to help you make spending decisions by organizing information from you and your friends was launched using a Facebook application.

Basically, the idea is to determine “the next best thing” in your environment or area whether it is eateries, hair stylists, malls, shopping centers, cinemas or just about any place you’ve visited. Users will write little notes (as in reviews) about the businesses around them and also rate them.

Nwalla encourages you to “like” businesses and reviews by your friends to help spread the news to your other friends. This helps them index and quickly discover more locations and businesses and provides better search results for you. More data is better data.

Talking about the ratings, there are 5 simple rating levels from El-PERFECTO (5) being the best to ARRGHH!! (1) being the least. Around the application, you may also see average rating which implies what and how everybody is generally rating the particular business.

The product is in its beta version and is only available in Nigeria, but they hope to  move out to other countries and possibly index the world. Hmm, that sounds like Google’s audacious goal to organize all of the world’s information.

Nwalla understands that trying to organize and present information that helps you make your spending decisions could be a very daunting task. However, they are committed to making it successful.

Will it work?

For one thing, location-based social networks such as Gowalla and Foursquare have been quite successful, even though they are both in a location war. One of the reasons is because people are really interested in sharing information about places they’ve been, businesses they know or events they’re about to go to.

While I’m not sure whether Nigerians would be willing to share such information, I must admit that the idea behind Nwalla is cool. Perhaps, what is coolest is the fact that Nwalla is using a Facebook app to gather this information. Facebook active users in Nigeria is about 1.3 million, according to Facebakers.

My guess is that Nwalla would be leveraging on this figure to send people friend requests and get them to recommend the app to their friends. Also, when people “like” businesses and reviews by their friends, it could help spread the news to other friends.

It would be interesting to see how Nwalla hopes to monetize by helping people make the right spending decisions.

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