Gowalla is a location based social networking website that has raised $8.4 million in funding. Greylock Partners was the lead investor and the company plans to use the funding to strengthen their development capabilities. Thus far Gowalla has raised over $10 million since they started in 2007.

“Gowalla has rapidly attracted a passionate user base by creating an innovative, useful service that is also a lot of fun,” stated Greylock’s David Thacker. “It’s exciting to discover new places and earn stamps for your passport from places as diverse as Buckingham Palace and the Sydney Opera House to the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and the coffee shop down the street. Gowalla also connects you with your friends, letting you share your travels and meet up with others in real time.” Thacker has joined the Gowalla Board of Directors as part of the investment.

LinkedIn co-founder and Greylock Partner Reid Hoffman also joined Gowalla’s board of directors as an observer.

Other investors in Gowalla include Jason Calacanis, Kevin Rose, Maples Investments, Shasta Ventures, Ron Conway, Gary Vaynerchuk, Shervin Pishevar, and Chris Sacca. Previous investors Alsop-Louie Partners and Founders Fund also participated in this round.

Jason Calacanis is starting a new company called the Open Angel Forum. The reason he is starting this company is because he is sick of angel groups such as the Keiretsu Forum, Maverick Angels, and AlwaysOn charging start-ups for presenting. The investment company that Calacanis is starting will be a for-profit and will have chapters across 20 cities.

In the first quarter, a chapter will be opened in Los Angeles. This is where Calacanis lives and plays poker with over two dozen angel investors. Currently there are logos being voted up and Calacanis said he will discuss more about the business on his webcast.

When signing up for Twitter there is a list of recommended users to follow that appears. Those who were fortunate enough to be on that list of people instantly received hundreds of thousands or even millions of followers. Jason Calacanis, co-founder of Weblogs Inc. and Mahalo believed that the suggested user list was so valuable that he offered $250,000 to be on it.

Twitter co-founder Biz Stone said that the company is currently exploring alternative ways to introduce prominent users to new members of the micro-blogging community. Some of the prominent users include politicians, news outlets, sports athletes, actors, and actresses.

“That list will be going away,” stated Stone when talking to reporters in Putrajaya, Malaysia. “In its stead will be something that is more programmatically chosen, something that actually delivers more relevant suggestions.”

It even got to the point that politicians started criticizing the list themselves too. Some Republicans said that Democrats are heavily favored in the suggested user lists than Republicans. Twitter employees say that they choose the suggested users list based on who posts messages often and engages with followers. Currently Twitter has about 54 million users.

Savings.com is a couple website that recently redesigned and hired Mahalo CEO and co-founder of Weblogs Inc. Jason Calacanis.  “They’ve broken $10 million in revenue after just a couple of years,” stated Calacanis, “and are crushing it in the deals space. Obviously this is a great place to be in a recession.”

Savings.com redesigned their website to make their services more social.  After saving money on a deal, users can share the deals with their friends.  There are coupons available across 3,400 different merchants.

Coupons are available for stores such as the Gap and Restoration Hardware.  There is also tickets for the San Diego Zoo.  The coupon search engine is available for categories broken down by brands and stores.  Each coupon deal can be voted up and commented on.  Deals can be shared through Twitter, Facebook, Digg, Delicious, Reddit, and e-mail.

Savings.com CEO Loren Bendele said that he expects the company to make about $10 million in revenues.  The service also expects to help bring in about $200 million for participating retailers.  Savings.com has raised about $6 million in capital from angel investors and several venture capitalists.  The most recent funding round was provided by U.S. Ventures and took place in October 2008.

[via TechCrunch]

Jason Calacanis’ human-powered search engine Mahalo is growing at a pretty good pace, but not fast enough.  So far there are about 100,000 topic pages created by workers contributing content for free.  Many of Mahalo’s pages have a high Google PageRank.

Mahalo already has currency called “Mahalo Dollars.”  Mahalo Dollars can be traded in for an exchange rate of 75 cents to the dollar or can be used to buy and sell other Mahalo pages.  Mahalo Answers reached about one million users last month.  These users can create their own topic pages and manage them.  There can be only one editor per page and Mahalo would split the Google AdSense revenue: 50-50.  Not a bad deal considering how much traffic Mahalo receives.  The Mahalo topic pages are first come, first serve.

Calacanis believes in Mahalo so much that he even offered Twitter $250,000 to be a suggested user to follow.

[via TechCrunch]

I thought pretty highly of Jason Calacanis at one point.  He started and sold a successful company to AOL.  He created the platform that brought us websites like Download Squad, TMZ, and Engadget.  But some of his more recent ideas seem pretty shady to me.  He hired top users on Digg to become active on AOL’s social bookmarking site Propeller and now he is offering Twitter with $250,000.

Here’s how it works.  When someone new registers for an account at Twitter, they are suggested to follow several high-profile accounts such as CNN, JetBlue, FragDolls, NPR, NYT, Terry Moran, John McCain, Coldplay, Nightline, Tony Hawk, Michael Ian Black, Martha Stewart, 50 Cent, Ryan Seacrest, TIME, Fred Durst, and Soulja Boy.  Late last month, I wrote about how suggested users are sending tons of followers to those who are recommended.

Apparently Jason Calacanis believes that being on suggested users will be worth as much as a Super Bowl ad within 5 years.  This is why he is offering $250,000 to Twitter to be added to the list of suggested users to follow. Calacanis was one of two co-founders of Weblogs Inc. which sold to AOL for about $30 million several years ago so this $250K will not make much of a dent on his earnings.

While I think that this is a pretentious idea, Calacanis has that kind of money to blow so why not…

This should also be a wake-up call for Twitter that they are being biased towards certain users.  Perhaps they shouldn’t even have the Suggested Users feature or at least make it more advanced based on a new users’ interest.

Personally I like the way that StumbleUpon’s registration works.  When you sign up for StumbleUpon, you choose certain categories of content that you like such as Technology, Health, Music, Lifestyle etc.  Based on those interest categories, you are recommend different websites to stumble upon.  Twitter should have a similar registration rather than listing recommended users that the company has an interest with.  That sounds like a conflict of interest case to me.