Findery: Make Places Come Alive
Findery helps people document places they care about, share those memories and discover new places through others’ stories. This is not the geo-tagging of Facebook and Instagram, but a new angle on place-based social media with a clear emphasis on storytelling.
Users can create “sets” of notes centered around the same topic or theme, like childhood memories or historical landmarks. Notes in sets can include links to each other, creating chronologies, or they can be placed on the map at random. Users can tag one another in posts and can set notes to be discoverable by anyone, discoverable by specific others or private.
The website currently has a small — but active — user community where members can recognize each other by their profile pictures on the map. You can scan for notes left by @donald, Findery team member Donald Tetto, by seeking the image of a man in a giraffe mask.
Findery’s intimate community is further developed by the use of tags. “Helpmefindery” is a new tag, inspired by the success of one poster’s call for help in identifying the setting of an old photo of his grandfather — within a half hour of his posting, another user had determined the spot to be since-demolished Bernstein’s Fish Grotto in San Francisco. The team promotes tags for “findery challenges,” invitations for users to post notes about their first kisses, farthest travel destinations or brushes with the law.
For those more interested in exploring others’ notes than posting their own, the Findery team spotlights compelling sets and users — such as @The Sock Project’s documentation of donating socks to the homeless and @Missed’s descriptions of lost opportunities with attractive strangers.
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