From the desk of Matt Otepka...
If the glove box in your car is anything like mine it has dozens of tattered and yellowing road maps for states you haven’t lived in for 10 years or from past road-trips through places that you don’t have any plans to drive back through, at least until a second mortgage isn’t needed to fill up your car. You probably also have random driving directions in the form of recent print outs from Mapquest.com or Google Earth, which got me to thinking – do people still buy maps?
Tens of millions of us have the Web with us right in the car now and even more carry GPS-enabled cell phones – the old Rand McNally atlas is a thing of the past. The great thing about online maps is not only the freshness of location data but also the depth and breadth of additional, relevant information. Traditional maps only show you roads, cities, rivers and maybe denote locations for museums, post offices or state parks. (Snore- today, people want more.) And, if you’re really, really lucky, you might have a map with a legend showing where to find fishing and camping access or where churches or rest stops might be. (A sarcastic whoopee for that!!)
Now, pull the same map up online, and depending on what program you use, you’ll be able to find mountains of relevant information about everything in front of your eyes. You can search, sort and pinpoint places of interest like restaurants, bars, hotels, retail shops, or see traffic and weather patterns or even get street-level views of specific locations.
And thanks to the growth of the mobile web, new Web 2.0 applications and hardware advances in handheld devices, all of this is at our fingertips – whether on a portable laptop or out in the world from our iPhone, BlackBerry or whatever. But what is really exciting, especially as I’m in the process of planning my next road trip, is the integration of social data into maps.
How much more powerful and relevant do maps become when you can look at them in the context of where your friends have been and what they thought of those places and events while they were there? That’s what the web is moving to and there is a new application called Whrrl that does just that. (Full disclosure – Whrrl is a product of a client of ours, Pelago, and I must admit, I fell in love with the application on my last road trip. Goodbye, Rand McNally.)
The social data that apps like Whrrl provide fundamentally changes the notion of a map. It changes it from a navigation tool – something to help you get from point A to point B – into an entirely new social discovery experience.
So the next time you’re taking a road trip or just going to a part of town you don’t know, look at a paper map and then imagine thousands of little dots popping up all over it highlighting places visited by people in your social network. Or, open your cell phone, hop on Whrrl and start discovering new places with the help of the people you know and trust – your friends.
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