funkybro,
How do people feel about one company (Groundspeak) controlling, and
making money out of, their geocaching data (and all their effort in
hiding and finding caches)?
About the same as I feel
about Google making money by indexing and rehosting Web pages written by
me which I didn't submit to them and didn't agree to them listing.
Which is to say: "meh".
Groundspeak is about 0.01% the
size of Google, but they both illustrate the fundamental point that on
the Internet, the whole is greater than the sum of its parts: a huge
amount of data items, all of which are worth exactly $0.00 individually,
nevertheless acquires value only because someone has invested time and
money in a system to aggregate it. I choose to regard the effort which
I've put into the caches which I've placed and listed, as "payment" for
the caches which I've been able to find because other people do the
same. If someone's prepared to host all that for me for $30, or (for non
PMs) a few minutes of eyeball time trying to avoid looking at Google
ads, then good on them.
View Postfunkybro,
Of course it has the broadest selection of caches. But that's about all it has going for it IMO.
That
seems to be a bit like saying "my local shopping centre has a large
selection of shops selling things which people want to buy, but that's
about all it has going for it". :)
People come to
Geocaching (the game) to get outdoors and have fun, and they come to
Geocaching.com to find lists of places where they can go to do that.
That's really all that most people want. 90% of players don't even have a
premium membership, so they are apparently reasonably satisfied with
being able to search for caches near their house, browse the
descriptions, and - gasp! - print them off (it's about two years since I
printed a cache listing, but I'm always amazed to see how many people
do it).
There's a higher proportion of "computer types"
in this game than in the population as a whole, and it's natural for us
geeks to look at the site from that world view. But if you get out to
events and meet people, you'll find hardly anybody who wants more
"exciting" features from the site. In fact, quite a few people moan
whenever something is changed because the place where they used to click
has moved or whatever. It's like a well-worn pair of walking boots: you
wouldn't buy them new in that state, and there are smarter alternatives
available, but the ones you have do the job and don't give you
blisters. :D
I agree that some corners of the site are a
little clunky, but it's not easy migrating the UI of hundreds of GB of
SQL data (and dozens of TB of photographic data) while maintaining
something close to 24/7 uptime. Groundspeak is about 0.01% of the size
of Google or Facebook or Amazon; in fact you can see their entire staff,
including admin, interns, support, and the people who package the
merchandise here (I count 25 faces, plus the frog).
And
of the other sites which have been mentioned, most are hardly models of
great UI design. I quite like the appeal of OpenCaching's model, not
least because it's not stuck with English, but there's a big difference
between an open-source development project and a collaborative,
volunteer-run system operations project. Successful examples of the
latter are rare. That's why there are lots of great tools - proprietary
and open-source - to let you manage offline collections of caches, but
few successful online solutions because keeping a site up is hard (even
without the 800,000 cache listings head start which Groundspeak has).
