Social networking website Gowalla  today announced three additional services to further exploration at the local level. These features are City Pages, Verified Businesses and Venues, and the Stamp Calendar, which gives businesses the opportunity to connect with people visiting their locations.

City Pages is available in three metro areas world wide. The community is a directory created by users themselves sharing the best locations and deals at a particular area, with a map, from the best cup of coffee spot to the place of the best live bands. Since last month, some 10,000 passport holders have posted an accumulated 30,000 highlights all over the globe.

“Gowalla’s mission is to inspire people to discover and share the world around them,” said Josh Williams, CEO and co-founder, Gowalla. “As of today, people have visited 2 million unique places in more than 170 countries around the world with Gowalla. Highlights are another way we’re giving our community the ability to share their connection with their favorite places.”

Another exciting feature from Gowalla is how business and venue owners can verify their location at Gowalla’s directory, with contact information, location details and other information.  The website will also choose remarkable locations to feature. They offer Passport Stamps as well, and will be earned when a person checks into that local spot via mobile phone. Curerently, they have over a thousand locations from landmarks to  businesses and venues.

“Since day one, we’ve been asked by businesses large and small how they can reach the Gowalla community,” continued Williams. “We believe the best solution needs to have an element of surprise and discovery, and the integration of our business tools with our new City Pages and Stamp Calendar provides a unique and unexpected way for businesses to connect with people on the go.”

The passport stamps is already available to businesses located at major cities New York, San Francisco and Austin, and will be displayed on the City Pages within the mobile app for iPhone, Android and Blackberry.  In all, the new features aim to bring Gowalla up to speed, addressing some of the ongoing areas in which the service could improve.

Gowalla is going deeper into local recommendations, which is ultimately local marketing.  This is something a number of location-based check-in tools are doing (i.e. Foursquare, Facebook Places), and making a direct appeal to businesses in order to work towards monetization, similar to Twitter’s methods of revenue-generation.