CommunityWalk: Another Collaborative Atlas
CommunityWalk is another in the long line of collaborative atlases. This is obviously going to be a hot topic area, and one we'll be covering at Where 2.0. Whoever wins this space will get a huge pile of user data, the way Gracenote (aka CDDB) did. The LBS and geospatial industries are data-based, so this user data could conceivably be quite valuable.
In particular, Where 2.0 will address the pitfalls, which CommunityWalk and others aren't addressing:
- Privacy and security (is Wikipedia-style security enough when we're talking about the real-life locations of real people?)
- Differentiation
- Ease of use (user interfaces on maps are not trivially easy)
- Useful metadata (if you sell the data to in-car nav systems, they'll want to know how to tell apart the places that people love and the places where people make love)
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I've used communityWalk to create several maps and I'm considering getting a few clients to use it on their websites.. what I like about is that it's quick and flexible.
I'd love to see all of these people present at Where 2.0 and what I would really like to see are some detailed comparisons. I think in a performace test where you create a custom map with five (or some set number) of custom points CommunityWalk would win by leaps and bounds.
I think it's interesting to look at things like privacy, security, metadata... but also look at flexibility, usefulness by users trying to map many points, and level of customization.
Check out this map and add to it:
http://communitywalk.com/map/5558
Nat, the social mapping space is not filled with collaborative atlas intiatives. IMHO, Wayfaring is a deeply entertaining geoplatform and frappr is successful friend and group mapper. We're each taking different routes in an effort to open mapping to the greater world and make it easy, fun and relevant.
Don't get me wrong, this is an important year for all of us and in a year some of our services will not exist and some will look entirely different as more and more users decide how THEY want to include place, context and geography into their lives.
Creating a collaborative atlas is uniquely and at it's core the Platial mission which ties into the stories we're collecting as well as the 60 world-wide partnerships around everything from biodiesel to fair trade we've established.
You raise great questions, which we'll all get to discuss for the first time as a group at Where 2 but I wouldn't haphazardly bundle us all together or rush to turn this into a death match too early. We're at the beginning of something very very important and I don't believe anyone will stand out because they can add a place .7 seconds faster- that action will be commodified but our impact won't be.
The future is bright for several of our applications as it has been for everything from search engines to online community.
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Mikel [04.10.06 05:17 AM]
don't forget tagzania.com, frappr.com, flagr.com, mapbuilder.net, gmaptrack.com, foundcity.net ...