I've tried 'em all (all = location-based apps) and I'm a BobbyPin fan. Why? It's just so simple.
BobbyPin is a *simple* way to keep track of your favorites places and share them with friends. You can pin places to remember, add notes or tips about them, and easily organize them into collections of lists/maps. Follow and repin your friends' recommendations to your own maps, and share maps with anyone via the web whether they’re a registered user or not.
@avimillman to be honest, I've seen several apps for "saving" places and friend recommendations but I'm skeptical this is that big of a problem. I could be wrong but aren't most people satisfied with their current solutions (e.g. Foursquare, Yelp) and habits (sharing cool places with friends IRL or through social media)?
@rrhoover hey Ryan. Great question. There are a lot of folks playing in this space for sure. I tend to agree with you that the jury is still out regarding the best way to get local recs. But we actually came to the idea for BobbyPin very organically not out of a need we perceived for ourselves. Last year we created a tour-building interface for Stray Boots (an app for self-guided tours) that let users plot locations, add cultural and historic info, and publish a tour to our app. But it turned out that most users wanted to plot a map of their favorite spots and share that with friends really easily. It was as if the google My Maps wasn't simple or shareable enough and very difficult to get back to the maps you create. Same was true of Foursquare and some other tools that let you do that. So we tweaked our tour builder and made it into "stray boots maps" last summer. People liked the simplicity of it as a way to geolocate your favorite locations and share via a URL that anyone could access. That was the basis for the concept. But then we realized that at scale it would be much more convenient to look at maps from friends than to pour over reviews of the maps were available. So i think the question is can you get enough people in the community contributing content to make a social approach work. That's our aim. To make adding pins and creating collections easy and quick so we can have a denser community of contributors and tighter networks. Repinning places easily is one way we want to assist that. And generally simpler interfaces is another. We still have a lot of simplifying to do as some areas need to be more intuitive. But I do think it's interesting that most people I talk to about using yelp don't actually like it and find it frustrating. So I do think something will replace it. Whether that's something social or something more about taste mapping like Foursquare is pioneering is a big question for me.
@avimillman and I meant to add that I think all of us making tools for bookmarking places on maps does show a market need for a simpler tool to do that. And that's what we heard from users when we made a tour-building tool. Whether or not that's a big enough idea on its own rather than just a feature is a good question. I tend to view it as a feature. Ultimately the referencability and searchability of the bookmarked places is critical.
Hey Product Hunters! Thanks for posting BobbyPin @MorganBeller and thanks to the community.
I’m Avi Millman, the CEO and Founder of BobbyPin. Our long term mission is to make it so none of us ever have to read long, conflicting reviews ever again by creating a simpler way to get suggestions from your friends. You’re probably already trading recommendations with your friends by email, text, Facebook, and good old fashioned word of mouth. Now you can store them in one place, easily see them on a map, and reference them anywhere you go on any device.
The iPhone app makes it easy to reference yours and your friends’ spots easily on the go and add nearby spots on the fly (https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/...). The desktop interface makes it simple to add lots of spots and notes at once (www.bobbypin.co). While you can’t currently add content via the mobile website, it makes viewing, saving and sharing maps on the go easy.
Here’s an example of a map I made to keep track of different types of good date spots around NYC when I was a bit more active on the Tinder: http://www.bobbypin.co/p/r72kg. Feel free to save it, repin spots, or share your own map in the comments (I’ll be in SF this fall and could use some good spots to eat).
We know we have a long way to go, so we’d love your feedback - the good, the bad, and the ugly. Thanks again for having us. -Avi.
@gizboz1 that sounds like the "bad and the ugly" - can you send a screenshot of the error to me. Here's my email: avi@bobbypin.co. Re Mapstr, one major difference is that we have a website, and we think the web is important for a couple reasons. First, our desktop website makes it really easy to add a bunch of places at once given the full keyboard and general ease of use of a desktop interface. Secondly, and perhaps more importantly, you can share any map via the web with anyone and it's accessible on any device whether someone is a registered user or not. So we think that lets users share their stuff with non-users very easily no matter what device you're on. Some other subtler differences I'm happy to chat about as well. Love what those guys are doing, though, too, and definitely think we're addressing a similar need.
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