Now for real; The new virtual: Challenges!

Whoops, it turns out that Cumbyrocks and myself were wrong about the new virtuals, although we both still think it is a great idea…. But this really is what Groundspeak refers to as the new virtuals: Challenges!

Here is a small description of what challenges will be by CDJ Abuser on the Groundspeak forums:

"At GC2GA1J, Jeremy explained that the ‘new’ virtuals would be implemented as ‘challenges’. Not challenge caches (or caching challenges) obviously, but he explained that he and his team saw virtuals as a ‘go somewhere and do something’ kinda thing, and that’s what the new ‘challenges’ will be. The first released type will be a photo challenge: go somewhere and take a picture. He also explained that there will be no review system, but rather some kind of rating system, with good challenges rising to the top and bad ones falling to the bottom and (maybe?) eventually disappearing, and that the whole system was seen as an experiment on their part.”

From this piece of information I am not very thrilled about the challenges. This first challenge type, the go somewhere and take a picture, is very similar to the old virtual cache where you had to take a picture or answer a question to prove you have been at the location. I have never liked this kind of caches as there was no logging opportunity to share your initial feeling with the cache owners and other cachers. And the first reaction is always the best. I was also missing the creativity from the cache owner. Taking a picture is just too easy. With a little bit of creativity and a good hint, you can hide a cache everywhere, also in the most crowded places.

Now the new challenges. I like the word challenges. I think each Geocache is a challenge. A go there and write your name the logbook challenge. From what Jeremy explained to CDJ Abuser, I understand that Groundspeak is going to release challenge types. In my opinion, Groundspeak should give this to the users and only provide a platform to create and share your type of challenge with the Geocaching community.

What the challenge will be is up to the creativity of the challenge owner. It can vary from ‘take a picture’ to ‘scan the QR code’ or ‘do the Macarena dance with at least 10 strangers and post a video of it in the log’ challenge. As long as you can prove you have completed the challenge, maybe with some simple additional functionality on the Geocaching website, for example secret logging codes criteria, it is a challenge. If you see where the community has taken the Geocache since it was first placed in the year 2000, I think the creativity from challenge creators goes far beyond what Groundspeak can think of as challenge types and therefore Groundspeak should only be the platform provider.


If Groundspeak is prepared to give the creativity to the community, they could become the community leader and online meeting point for things like flash mobs, planking and other weird and less weird stuff people love to do as a challenge... Wouldn't that be great?

The new virtual?

Hold your horses on that Munzee thing I was blogging about last week. Why would you need that QR code? It is the GPS functionality of your smartphone that can be checked to confirm you are on the right location to do a log attempt on the internet! No QR code hiding, no searching, just visiting the coordinates is good enough! Wouldn’t that be great? It looks like this will become reality as it is exactly what Groundspeak is going to do with the new virtual!

At first I thought the new virtual would be some kind of Wherigo-like application that gives you a code if you get close to specific coordinates. You would need this code to log the virtual cache on the internet. However, in a Globalcaching chat session, Bryan Roth denied the link between Wherigo and the new virtual. When I described Groundspeaks move from the standalone GPSr to the smartphone in my post on the new Geocaching website layout, it looks like I got even closer to the new virtual. I only did not do the math, replacing Wherigo with smartphone.

Last week Cumbyrocks on his blog ‘It’s not about the numbers’ did do the math and described a theory which is comparable to my theory about the new virtual, but based it on the smartphone. The result is what I described in the introduction of this article. I think Cumbyrocks got very close to what Groundspeak talks about as the new virtual. Here is a quote from Jeremy from the Groundspeak forums to support these thoughts:

"In the UserVoice updates I never said that virtuals were coming back in their previous form, but instead something would be available that should capture the interest in virtuals without the baggage (such as the subjective review process).

To me, this is the most exciting project that we’ve worked on in years, but it will take some time to iterate through the idea and I know we’ll get some things wrong, but the framework is solid. We’ll be investing a substantial amount of effort with this project moving forward.

Some points:

It will be on Geocaching.com, not a new web site. It will be a separate section in the beta, but I expect it to be integrated into a joined search at some point.

Currently they will not go towards your find count, but it might at some point. It won’t at the beginning though.

It will be a visible statistic, so you will see them on the profile, on the logs, etc.

We’ll be hopefully launching with mobile applications to compliment the activity. I expect that the majority of participants will be using smartphones, but we will have components (Pocket Queries, GPX file downloads, etc) for traditional GPS devices.”

The issue with to old virtual was that you needed the photo or the answer on a question to prove that you have been at the location. There was no box and no log to sign, the basics of Geocaching. Now, the internet connection and app functionality of the smartphone provides the opportunity to create a virtual box and write a digital log right from the spot!

I totally agree with Jeremy that this is one of the most exciting new projects. It gives a totally new approach to Geocaching, without going far from the basics. Without the approval process, this new virtual would be easier to create and appeal to more users to create such a cache. It also gives Geocaching a new advantage compared to rivals such as Opencaching and Munzee. Without the QR code, a virtual cache is easier to create and easier to find compared to a Munzee. And easy is the keyword nowadays. Compared to Opencaching, Geocaching will create something that appeals to a lot of Geocachers and something that Opencaching can never create, unless Garmin builds an internet connection into their GPSr devices.

Another thought is, that it was not Garmin who started the war with the Opencaching website but it was Groundspeak who are on the smartphone track for quiet some time already and put Garmin with their GPSr devices on the side of the road. To continue selling GPSr devices to Geocachers, the only option for Garmin was to start their own community, Opencaching. This also explains the messy Opencaching website, because they had to launch it quickly before Groundspeak openly embraces the smartphone as the main Geocaching attribute. But if you want more people Geocaching, like Groundspeak, I think the smartphone is the right track. Soon everybody has one and the only thing Groundspeak has to do is spread the message. Also, the smartphone opens doors for exciting new approaches to the game, like this new virtual.

Do you have your own theory about the new virtual or another remark to this post? Share them by writing a comment!

From stand-alone GPSr to mobile, the new geocaching.com homepage

While Groundspeak was upgrading the geocaching.com homepage, I was reading this article. The author is of the opinion that ‘Geocaching.com may not look as polished as its main rival’ (referring to opencaching). I already disagree with this opinion on the old geocaching.com homepage, I wonder what the author thinks about the new homepage.

First thing that caught my eye on the new homepage, is the ‘Go Geocaching with your smartphone’ line in the top right corner. Yes, it says smartphone, not GPSr. Spending 100€ on a GPSr is no longer needed to start geocaching. A smartphone, which you probably already have, is good enough. As I already said last year, Groundspeak is looking for ways to infect more people with the Geocaching virus. And these 5 words, ‘Go geocaching with your smartphone’, will take geocaching to the masses. You no longer need to go to a (web)shop spent 100€ and figure out how to operate your new toy. The largest hurdle is gone. People are looking for the coolest apps for their smartphone, and a treasure hunting app would perfectly fit in that category.

Second thing that caught my eye, is that the new homepage is so much more starter friendly. The old homepage was perfect for existing users with quick links to 'your profile' and the 'hide & seek a cache page'. For newbies the old homepage was hell. In the new design, Groundspeak kept the quick links to ‘your profile’ and ‘hide and seek a cache’ and added starter friendliness. The new homepage explains with a nice picture what geocaching is, there are multiple links to the start guide, explaining geocaching in more detail and there is the link to make your smartphone geocaching ready. From the old homepage, you had to go through hell and back to get the same information and get started. This new homepage is a huge improvement for starters.

Another remarkable thing that is promoted to the homepage is the ‘local organisations’ link under ‘community’. This is a big appreciation from Groundspeak for the work the local organisation have done. Groundspeak is seeing the importance of the local organisations for themselves and the geocaching community. Local organisations pick up everything groundspeak can not do themselves. Besides keeping relations with land managers, bringing local geocachers together on a forum and by organising events, local organisations are the innovators of new functionality of the geocaching.com website. They have the lean organisation needed to quickly build innovative new functionality and they are less dependent on their relatively small user base. So if new functionality fails, it is not such a big deal as it is for groundspeak.

Last but not least is that the new site design is mobile friendly. The menu on the left hand side was killing for mobile devices with small screens. Now the full width of the screen can be used to view the information you want to view. And as said before in this post, mobile devices are the future.

Yes, I like the new geocaching.com homepage a lot. It has opened the door to the new geocaching era of smartphones but also left wide open the door to the traditional era of the GPSr, as it should be. I am looking forward to the cache hiding creativity of the newbies with their smartphones but I think the smartphone is not yet ready to replace the ruggedized stand alone GPSr’s for more frequent geocaching. The new geocaching.com homepage fits that suit perfectly.

Will geocaching ever be spoiler free?

This week, the Groundspeak newsletter asked your attention to keep geocaching spoiler free. In the Netherlands, a big discussion is going on around spoilering. The discussion was started from two sides:

1. A blog post by Nav2Paddy with a videolog (has been removed from his website after the chaos it has caused), picked up by Phoenix-night for his friend, cache owner Dukkie;
2. The Geoleaks forum, a forum to help or to get help to solve a mystery cache.

These two items caused a serious scene in the Netherlands. Cache owners started archiving their caches and on the forums there appear to be just as many users who are against spoilering as users who do not see this as an issue. The first feedback item, a request to Groundspeak to make a statement against spoilering, was opened and approved by Groundspeak. Result was section 4m added to the Terms of use:

“You and not Groundspeak, are entirely responsible for all content that you upload, post or otherwise transmit via the Site. You agree not to:
....
(m) Publish, in any form of media, the solutions, hints, spoilers, or any hidden coordinates for any geocache without consent from the cache owner.”

Geocachers against spoilering reacted very positive on this statement, and have contacted Geoleaks to force them to close down their forums because they are acting against the terms of use of Groundspeak. Geoleaks declined the requests because in their opinion Groundspeak is not allowed to act based on what is being posted on a third party forum. And they are right. If you read the terms of use clearly, you can see that they are only applicable to the geocaching.com website and forums. They are not applicable at all to e.g. your own website or any random other forum!

So today, a new request has been opened, to ban public spoiling geocachers. I think this is going way too far. You can not ban users from your site because of their behaviour on another website. Currently Groundspeak is kindly asking you to behave like your mother has told you to do. They could take it one step further and start a discussion with the people behind the spoiler websites, twitter accounts etc., but that is all they can do.

I would not act at all against spoilering on third party websites. It is part of the game. If people are having fun playing the game this way, let them play their game. Geocaching should be all about having fun outdoors. Everyone in their own way. And the cache owners? Just like Groundspeak, also cache owners can not make everybody happy the way they want to. You can not force people to act a certain way. In stead you should focus on the 90% of the geocachers enjoying your cache like you have intended it to be. But also cache finders can help: Write a decent log. A log which makes the cache owner happy and clearly points out you have taken the whole jouney, including the joy of solving the puzzle.

And what about the video log? See it as a good add for your cache. The geocacher behind the camera has also put efforts in making the video, please respect that. Off course the satisfaction for the cache finder will be greater if they find something amazing when they did not know what to expect. But maybe without the video, they would never have done your cache and you would not have been able to give them some satisfaction at all! In Dutch we say: When the glass is half empty, think of it as being half full.

Geocaching on a pair of Timberlands

Last week, 24 caches in parks around 6 cities in Europe have been published related to the Nature Needs Heroes campaign. Nature needs heroes is the latest campaign of shoes and clothing brand Timberland. All over Europe these caches caused noise. Why is Groundspeak allowing these commercial caches?

First of all, commercial caches are allowed with special permission from Groundspeak, see the last remark from the guidelines below:

"Commercial caches are disallowed. As a general rule, reviewers will not publish cache pages that seem commercial. A commercial cache has one or more of the following characteristics:

* It requires the finder to go inside a business, interact with employees and/or purchase a product or service.
* It has overtones of advertising, marketing or promotion.
* It contains links to businesses, commercial advertisers, charities, political agendas or social agendas.
* It contains the logo of a business or organization, including non-profit organizations.
* The name of a business or commercial product is on the cache page.
* On very rare occasions, Groundspeak makes an exception for a commercial cache. Arrangements are made before placement. If your cache is commercial in any way, please contact Groundspeak for clarification about how to comply with cache listing guidelines."

This way, Groundspeak has given itself the possibility to limit the commercial use of geocaching to those exceptional cases where there is something in it for them, which is quite fair I think. With the current amount of active geocachers worldwide, Groundspeak would be an interesting party for a lot of brands to make their message heard, like Timberland. This could be another significant source of revenue, besides the webshop, site banners and premium membership.

However, Groundspeaks Financial lackey Bryan Roth explained to me by mail that Groundspeak has cooperated with Timberland cost neutral, which means they have not gained any money on the promotion. According to Bryan, the main driver for Groundspeak to work with Timberland was to introduce new audiences to geocaching.

For Groundspeak and Timberland, the knife of the Nature Needs Heroes campaign cuts on both sides. The Timberland brand is introduced to the geocaching community and I think, there will be a phase 2 where Timberland is going to promote the caches to their audience and spread the message of geocaching.

I already blogged in May last year that Groundspeak is not considering geocaching as a secret hobby. As already said last year, more geocachers equals more fun for other geocachers and more money from premium memberships and site banners. This campaign is certainly not going to be the last campaign. While you might waste your time on complaining about this, I am looking forward to the creative caches placed by people wearing Timberland shoes and I just hope they are just a big adventure as this:

Not my favorite...

…cache rating system. Late December the favorites functionality was introduced on the geocaching.com website. If you are a premium member, you earn a favorite point for every tenth found log. You can give these points to the caches you liked most. This way other geocachers can see what you liked and put more quality in their daytrip planning.

This new functionality gives other geocachers the opportunity to make a daytrip planning based on your recommendations rather then on the information in logs only. With the current density of geocaches to choose from, any qualified information in a rating system is better then no rating system at all. That is what makes the favorites functionality look like a great new feature. I think it is a great new feature, but it is not the best feature it could have been.

Why? Because I want to see what I might like, not what other people liked. With the current rating system, I can make a list of caches in a certain area and sort on favorite points (Hide & Seek a cache --> Seek a cache by address --> enter a radius --> Go --> click on the blue favorite icon in the header row to sort). For sure this will put a good cache on top of the list, but it is still based on what other people liked.

According to Groundspeak lackey Bryan Roth in a global caching chat, Groundspeak is working on an algorithm that presents you caches you might like based on awarded favorite points by you and by other people. For example, If you and someone else both awarded a favorite point to cache A and this other person also has awarded a favorite point to cache B, which you have not yet found, you will probably like cache B because you both liked cache A. The more favorited caches you share with another cacher, the more likely it is you will like the caches the other user has favorited and you have not yet found. This algorithm would make the result of the rating system more personalised and gives me a list of what I might like instead of what other people liked, which is exactly what I want.

However as I said, it is not the best system. It only takes into account the caches I have awarded a favorite point and not the other 9 out of 10 caches. Imagine you would have a rating system which gives you the possibility to rate every found cache on a scale from one to five with one being poor and five being excellent. These are some results entered by you and other cachers in this imaginary rating system:

	Cache A	Cache B	Cache C	Cache D
You	5 points	Not Found	2 points	Not found
Cacher 1	5 points	5 points	4 points	1 points
Cacher 2	5 points	4 points	1 points	5 points

If 5 points resembles a favorite point, the Groundspeak algorithm would present you cache B and cache D in random order because you all liked cache A. However my imaginary rating system would also take cache C into account and because your rating on this cache is closer to cacher 2 then cacher 1, your caching taste is more like cacher 2. So, although cacher 1 does not like cache D, this would be the cache you would most likely like because your geocaching taste resembles cacher 2. Imagine this scenario with a lot more data behind it (your amount of founds) and there will be a lot of difference in the accuracy of the results of the rating systems!

But, as I said before, any rating system is better then no rating system. So here, under lists, you will find my favorited caches. I have 5 favorite points in my pockets. I only give them to caches which really deserve them, as I do not want you to visit caches I favorited which are not really remarkable. Please also be critical as it influences the decision for my next hunt!

By the way, my imaginary rating system is called GcVote. It does not contain the described algorithm and also the usage by other cachers in my region is very low. Just like other cachers, I also prefer a Groundspead branded rating system as more people are aware of and using it. Unfortunately this makes GcVote useless. Nevertheless the best solution was right before Groundspeaks eyes but they did not take it. Shame, shame, shame.

Geocaching is going Social!

With the release of the beta maps late December, you got this pop up when you visited the beta maps for the first time. In this pop up there was the announcement of something called Geocaching Social, something I see a huge potential for and I already blogged about half November. With the recent release of new features on the site and loads of interesting features in the pipeline, Groundspeak is really moving forward with the geocaching.com website to get all potential out of it. I just hope that geocaching social turns out to be something like I have described in my November post or even something better!

Are you also curious what Geocaching Social is going to be or do you have your own opinion about what it should be or could add to the geocaching community? Write it down as a comment to this post or discuss it on the globalcaching forum (in Dutch). Big thanks to Hemma for referring to my blog!

Ps. I am having plans to revive my blog. More details will follow next week, so subscribe to the RSS feed already to keep updated!

Geocaching.com, a social media?

About 2 weeks ago I posted a functionality request called ‘follow my friends’ geocaching adventures’ on the geocaching.com website. Basic idea of this request is that I want to get an e-mail digest of the logs of my geocaching friends. This way I am updated on the adventures of my friends, so we have something to talk about when we meet or call and I get inspiration for my own geocaching adventures from the positive experiences of my friends. If they had a positive experience finding a geocache, I would like to have that experience as well and will go out and try to find the same cache.

From this idea, I have thought a little bit further down the road. Geocaching claims to be a game with a strong sense of community as you can read on the geocaching.com homepage. I asked to myself: “Can the geocaching platform not only have a sense of community, but actually contribute to peoples lives by making the platform more social? To answer this question, let’s first define what ‘social’ is. According to Wikipedia social media is described as following: “Social media are media for social interaction, using highly accessible and scalable publishing techniques.” According to this definition, geocaching.com is already some sort of social media. Geocachers can publish caches and other user can find them and publish their experience in a log. Other users can watch caches and read the logs of other peoples. This is graphically represented in the picture below.



But is this information highly accessible? No, at this moment it is not. On the geocaching.com website there is no feature which informs you about new caches in your area. The geocahing.com website always waits for your action. Many websites in the geocaching community have built a solution for this issue and keep track of and inform you about the latest additions. In contrary to caches, you can be actively informed about the latest logs on certain cache by using the ‘watch cache’ feature. But, as mentioned before, the information in a log is not only interesting for people who are watching a cache, it is also interesting for people who want to be informed about the adventures of a certain geocacher.

My simple request increases the accessibility of information. But it does not increase the social interaction. You can receive the log in your mailbox, but you cannot respond to it. For example if a friend of mine has, to my opinion, experienced a great adventure, I want to let him know. My friend, or other people, can respond to my message which gives us interaction.

This interaction is great opportunity for the geocaching.com website. Why? Because if you can interact through the website with other people in the community, even expand your social network by interacting with people who are not on your friends list, the geocaching website has not only a sense of community but actually has an added value to peoples lives, by being a platform to expand your social network. It will not only be a fun game to play, but it helps you meet other interesting people in a fun way as well, by meeting online and searching for a geocache in the woods together.

There are many platforms to interact with your friends and meet new friends online, like Facebook, MySpace and LinkedIn. A geocaching social network will never become as big as these names, but it will be far more interesting for geocachers because it has that extra dimension to it. Meet online, go out there and find that cache, together as friends.

Geocaching, the public secret

On may 18th, the first Lost and Found video was released featuring the 3 founders of the geocaching.com website. In this short video they talk about the founding of the website but also about the future of geocaching. I asked the same question to Brian Roth, one of the founders, in a chat organised by globalcaching.nl a couple of months ago. The answer was very simple, but not what I expected...

Especially for the geocaching dinosaurs (as early adaptors of the geocaching game are sometimes called), one of the exciting parts of geocaching is to be a member of this secret community searching for hidden tupperware treasures. They want to keep the geocaching community small. In their opinion a lot of new geocachers are trend followers, running for the simple caches out there to be a kilo cacher in no-time and after a few months move on to their next exciting new hobby. I must say, they have a point here. More geocachers equals more noise around the secret hobby causing more attention for cache rippers.

Groundspeak however, is going exactly the other way. For the question of the future of geocaching I was expecting an answer in the area of new features for the current geocaching community, such as Wherigo. Groundspeak however, is not focussing on the current geocaching community, but on increasing the geocaching community by reaching other people outside the current geocaching community. They simply just want more people geocaching. Off course they want to put a smile on peoples faces with their work, like they mention in the video, but also from their commercial point of view it makes sense. More geocachers means more traffic on the geocaching.com website, equals more income from banners and advertising.

So, if you already have problems with the large number of geocachers out there running through the forest hunting for a cache, I wish you luck for the next years. If you are waiting for exciting new developments in geocaching, you might have to wait some more time as they are not coming from groundspeak but, like wherigo, from the GPSr manufacturers. In meantime, I just look for the creativity that a few new geocachers will add to the community and try to keep away from all the rubbish that all the other new geocachers put out there...