Gowalla, a service that helps you keep up with friends and share your favorite places,  announced the release of its most significant update, both in terms of design and utility: Gowalla 3. The tool lets you keep track of your friends’ whereabouts on multiple networks, including Gowalla, Facebook and Foursquare, all from a single activity tab.  It’s a somewhat unexpected move, as these other sites are considered competitors to Gowalla, but in the budding world of check-ins, partnerships are still the way to go.

The updated Gowalla now supports check in features for both Facebook Places and Foursquare, as well as sharing options across Tumblr and Twitter. The company also boasts of an easier check in feature with the employment of a faster check-in interface; just tap the Check In button at the tab bar. Additionally, this feature supports auto-fill options based on your previous history and current location, with a reported success rate of 80%. If the auto-fill fails to find your location, you can manually enter it with a few taps.

The feature does not end in adding your friends’ check-ins to your activity feed, as Gowalla also made it easier for users to preview friends’ photos. Gowalla’s “Highlights” feature is also now in Spot pages on the iPhone. You can view Highlights added to a spot, in addition to your own. Another feature is “Bookmarks” where you can flag your favorite spot, or the spots you wish to visit in the future. To remove a bookmarked spot, just go to the Spots tab. And finally, “Notes” which enables you to leave a note for a friend at a location where they can read once they check into that location. You can also leave one for yourself the next time you check in to that place (don’t forget the bottle of wine).

“This seems like a smart move, particularly since Gowalla has around 600,000 registered users (it calls them Passport holders), putting it behind Foursquare (which is “closing in” on 5 million) and Facebook Places (which isn’t offering any specific numbers, but is believed to be the biggest of all). If nothing else, it means that Gowalla fans will feel less pressure to switch, even if many of their friends are using a competing service. And they still have to use Gowalla if they want to use features like photos and comments,” says Venturebeat.

You can now download Gowalla 3 for the iPhone at iTunes. Gowalla 3 experience will be available for Android, iPad and Blackberry soon.

Check-ins and hyperlocal targeting is growing rapidly. Facebook Places is expanding, as well as Yelp.  Despite this rapid uptake by companies, consumers are still consisting of a specialized demographic – adults don’t seem to be checking in so often, but this trend may change as check-ins gain in popularity, and services find more ways to make check-ins applicable for larger audience bases.