Findery uses OpenPlaques data for some place's default notes.

When Caterina Fake and Stewart Butterfield founded Flickr in 2004, creating a community around photos was a huge challenge. "There were very few people on internet to begin with, and within that gr...

The site says that it’s like ‘Flickr for Places’ though there are other similar products. Repudo for example lets users place multimedia files, such as audio, photo video and text files, onto any location. Kevin Rose’s company Milk launched an app called Oink to let users rate things in different places, though it closed down recently.

It also could compete with the likes of Foursquare, which lets users check into locations, or even Pinterest, which lets users pin and share images they like. There’s also an element of Tumblr to it, what with its focus on photography and its quick ‘notes’ system resembling Tumblr’s quick ‘microblogging’ system.

Pinwheel came from a bunch of sources. On Flickr, you can put an annotation over an image, so people would do screenshots of Google Maps or Google Earth and put annotations or stories on them. Also, a lot of social services have ways to leave notes when they check into places. And then there’s geocaching.

On Pinwheel, you can follow people–and later businesses, organizations, blogs, etc. There are also sets, or collections of notes by users–”Art, Love and Literature,” “Hotels,” “Shopping,” and the like. One of the primary uses of mobile media, including Pinwheel, is finding and rating restaurants.

Remember when everyone in social media said it was time for location apps to go “beyond the check-in”? Well, it’s happening. While early leaders like Foursquare try to evolve to turn check-ins into local intelligence, some new apps like Highlight and Glassmap are going all in on helping people passively share their locations.

The new location-sharing apps promise to provide more value to users than ever — but they will surely teeter awfully close to the edge of creepy for many people.

Unless you go to Stanford or one of the 10 other colleges where it’s been tested, Glassmap may not have crossed your radar.

The stealthy-till-now company came out of the Y Combinator program last summer, and it’s specifically focused on colleges, families and tight groups of friends. The Glassmap app for iOS and Android constantly shares users’ locations and shows them on a map.

If you get her started, Caterina Fake sounds almost like a professor of social networking philosophy.

One particularly interesting theory of Fake’s is about how an online community should grow in its early days. She thinks the answer is very clear: Slowly.

Fake added emphatically that the worst thing a start-up social network can do is to buy advertising to attract users. Growth should happen because users find value in a site, and then get their friends to join, she said.

And if users don’t come? Start-ups should try harder to make a better product.

That’s why Pinwheel plans to only slowly let in the tens of thousands of people on its email list, Fake said. And it’s why Pinwheel will ask users to write original notes, rather than filling the many empty places on its map with existing location-based content from around the Web. “We’re not going to suddenly metastasize by adding Wikipedia content,” Fake said.

Of course, 10 million dollars only gives Fake a window of time; there’s no guarantee that location-based storytelling will be a hit, or that Pinwheel will be the one to do it right.

If Pinwheel does end up working out, what it does may well change significantly, Fake admitted. Her advice to herself, and others: “You shouldn’t get attached to a feature set. You should get attached to a problem you’re solving.”

I’m keen to see how this will work in practice. I’ve got a feeling that Pinwheel works rather like Twitter, in that you’ll only see Sponsored Notes from organisations you chose to follow (if you’re already using the beta and know differently, please correct me on that).

On Pinwheel you can find and leave notes all around the world. The notes can be public or private, shared with an individual, a group or everyone. They can be organized into sets, such as, say, the “Tales from the Road: KISS’s 1974 Hotter Than Hell Tour”, “Best Spots for Butterfly Hunting”, “Every place that you told me that you loved me, circa 2008″ or “Find me a Nearby Toilet NOW”. You can follow people, places and sets. And in the future, you will get notifications on your phone from who and what you choose. Following sets is useful, because that friend of yours with the great taste in coffee shops may also have an unhealthy obsession with, say, 1970s glam metal band KISS, and frankly, in childhood you were traumatized by a photograph of Gene Simmons and don’t need to repeat that in your dotage.

User need on the internet is as much emotional as it is practical. When we are online we are deciding, moment by moment, what to pay attention to, what we value—who we are. And because self-identification is a primary need, we gravitate to products that remind us of our own minds. The idea of attaching information to physical places is not new. More than 2,000 years ago, the ancient Greeks invented “Artificial Memory” which was passed on to the Romans and developed all the way up through the Renaissance. Frances Yates’ brilliant The Art of Memory details the use throughout history of mental “places” as armatures of memory. The fact that the concept is not new is good. It means that the idea coincides with how our minds work and by extension, how we intuitively expect the world to be organized. So for the first positive I would say that Pinwheel efficiently corresponds to a way that we see the world already, which reduces one level of resistance.

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The point is that things don’t grow huge based on the slow accretion of individual users. Rivers start with seeping, but if they get not farther than that they are merely swamps, not rivers. To become a river you have to gather the flows of other, smaller rivers into yourself. If Fake can build a river with only $2 million, she will be doing very well indeed.

So, you heard it here, Pinwheel will be huge. Not because the tech world is an in-club (though, of course, it is), nor because the internet runs on hype (though, of course, it does), but because it meets all the criteria for achieving flow. And that, I suspect, is what all the VCs are really looking at anyway.

I knew it wasn't a new photo sharing site like Flickr. Or decision-making thingie along the lines of Hunch. Those had already been done. It was about Knotes, or, as Fake now calls it everywhere, Pinwheel.3

And then the reveal: Knotes—sorry Pinwheel—would be like a Flickr for geotagged notes. A service that lets you collect and share notes based on locations. I love location-based services and apps, and have a long-running interest in them. And Pinwheel is, very much, something I've always wanted. A way to transmit and receive information about particular locations that isn't tied to one action—like a checkin, or a game.

The current Google Goggles app for Android and iPhone lets you use the camera on your phone to generate search queries. You’ve heard about it, point your phone at the Eiffel Tower and contextual information pops up. When it’s on your phone it’s a toy, a gadget. But when it’s on your head—you become the gadget. The intimacy of that distinction will play to Pinwheels advantage.

I predict that some people will be very protective of their sense of self inside those goggles. Some people, of course, will rush in headlong and absorb any kind of stimulus Google wants to throw at them. But the kind of socially relevant information that will be contained in the Pinwheel note “overlay” will be useful in a way that the more generic Google Places data will not.

In some ways, Google’s size—and the self-created expectation that it be comprehensive—make it difficult for it to develop for social. Social constructs are governed as much by what they are not as by what they are. So although Google could apply some Google+ Circles segmentation to make Places more personalized, I bet that Pinwheel will create a critical mass of annotations quicker. At which point they become an attractive target for acquisition—by Google.

Flickr co-founder Caterina Fake’s new startup Pinwheel is very interesting — but it’s not an original idea. In fact it’s an idea that has been unsuccessfully tried by at least two startups in the past (Socialight and Flook). The central concept is that you can leave public or private geotagged notes that are associated with real-world places and can be discovered by others.

My guess is that those investors were ignorant of the failures of Flook and the original incarnation of Socialight, which had the same “real-world notes” idea at their core. However Fake’s execution (from what I can tell so far) looks a great deal more polished — and her timing is much better as well.

While Pinwheel is still trying to flush out its platform, the concept sounds fairly predictable for its genre. It’s a map-based UI that surfaces photos with notes from their photographers, and has a mobile and Web presence. This content can be private, public, or shared with certain other users.

The way Fake talks about it sort of reminds us of Capsule, a photo-heavy app that can act like a container for memories or events you share with certain people or groups of people. However while their focuses sound similar, the way they function sounds fairly different. A big part of Pinwheel will be the geo-social element, showing where in the world users have dropped their notes.

We do wonder how photo-focused the app is, however. It sounds like it’s trying to do a lot, and we’re wondering if it’s really built around creating beautiful images with the help of filters, cropping, a contrast toggle, or any other Camera+ type elements.

It’s an ambitious idea, and seems like it’s still trying to zero in on the action-meets-geography-meets-social genre, something which we’ve seen a lot of experimentation in recently. We’ll have more details as soon as we get some hands-on time with Pinwheel.

As many of you might know, I snap a lot of photos. Most of the time they’re all event photography (conferences, tweetups, parties, social gatherings, etc.), but on occasion, I do sightseeing, nature, and architectural-type photos. What I love about my camera is that it helps me capture the memories of where I’m at and lets me remember my life as I’ve lived it so far. But when I don’t have my fancy camera in tow, I rely on using my mobile device and often push these photos to Twitter, Facebook, Path, and Foursquare, but it doesn’t offer me any sentimental or contextual information with those sites. So imagine my interest in this new startup started by one of the founders of Flickr where the purpose is the “find and leave notes all over the world…”

Arion Hardison · Top Commenter · Software Developer at Diet Manager

I am sure that I am just missing something here but why does this need a 2 million dollar investment? Why do people keep funding things like this. We live in a time when it is easier to make a huge impact on the world than ever before and yet all the VC money keeps going to Groupon rip-offs and photo sharing sites. Do we really need yet another location based service for sharing photos?

Reply · 2 · Like · Follow Post · February 16 at 10:46pm

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