Defaulting notifications to on is wrong.

To be honest it was a crazy decision to turn on notifications for everyone when you did the upgrade recently. I was walking with a friend through Times Square yesterday and he started checking in to places. Suddenly he was getting text messages from people he was connected to on gowalla complaining about all the notifications they were suddenly getting, because they'd all unknowingly started receiving his notifications.

I myself went through and unfriended 80% of my friends on Gowalla so that I didn't start spamming them with unwanted notifications. Now I'm wary of friending anyone because I know they'll start getting all those messages without opting in.

Notifications of this kind should always be opt in, not opt out.

Agreed that notifications should default to “off.” I was using Gowalla on my iPhone for about thirty minutes last night as I was walking around, and it was actually difficult to use the app—I kept getting alerts as I was trying to add new spots. Definitely made me self-conscious about my own check-ins, for fear of spamming my friends.

I AGREE...
Too many push notifications are popping up on my iPhone. Whenever I add a new friend push notifications are ON by default, I would prefer if I could set this to OFF by default. I forget that I have to do it every time I add a new friend and I'm getting lots of messages on my iPhone.

Is there any way to change the default for push notifications to OFF?

This is a major problem for me, and it will soon cause me stop using Gowalla!
This would be a shame as otherwise the apps (web & iPhone) are excellent and fun to use.

Ditto. The new and improved friend finder is awesome, but only serves to show me the over 100 people I can't connect with in other cities because, though I want to see them in my timeline, I don't want to get their notifications... nor go through and manually find and turn their notifications off.

It would be great to have a preference. I do think it makes more sense to be off by default and opt in to users' updates (like Facebook or Twitter SMS settings).

It's a good example of a feature that doesn't scale.
It's neat with a core of a few very good friends for which you want to be notified but can becomes tough to manage (despite the easy access to the notification settings).

Worse, as some people have explained here, it hurts the social aspect of the game by making people self-conscious about their check-in. Maybe it's intended, in which case it could be a way to shame people into not doing drive-by checkins. But do you guys want that? I doubt it. And finally it makes people think twice about accepting AND requesting new friends since they're afraid to floot/be flooded by notifications.

And finally, there is no way to kill a stream of checkin notifcation when it's happening, making Gowalla and the iPhone almost completly unusable until the push notifications stop. There should be a way to make it "shut up" for a while.

This is very frustrating and if it is not fixed soon. I will have to uninstall the application and stop using it.

--- UPDATE ---

I've figure out how opt out of push notifications on a person-by-person basis, but the default should be opt-out OR it should be easy to set all friends to "off" at one time.

I agree with everyone about the notifications being annoying and frustrating. I just started using Gowalla and I'm tempted to uninstall and stop using it because I can't figure out how to turn the push notifications off. I've seen a few people say they were able to turn them off, but not how.

I definitely don't want to keep spamming or be spammed just because I want to use Gowalla. It makes it hard to do anything on my phone because I keep getting notifications.

This is very annoying. I don't want to receive notifications evert time a friend checks in somewhere nor do I want to spam my friends. This MUST be an option not a default.

I started an idea on this topic:

http://feedback.gowalla.com/gowalla/t...

I think that there should be an additional option at Check-In on whether or not to notify friends.