On the day Barack Obama was inaugurated in January, 200 mobile phones were lost on the Washington DC Metro alone. A free lost-and-found service for your objects, called simply SendMeHome.com plans to reunite you with your precious objects by allowing you to register them, label them, and have the finder easily contact you to return the object. Great, and a must for any portable device. But there’s more…
What is more intriguing about SendMeHome.com is that it also invites you to send your objects on journeys, track their progress on a map, and have each person who encounters the object tell their story. This section of their site is simply called ‘Stories’.
The site has simple, well written descriptions and instructions:—
Stories gives you a rich multimedia, multi-author blog for any item that you register with SendMeHome.com. This gives you a way to track and share the life or journey of your item. You can tell the story of any item, you can even register yourself!
Stories helps you to promote a cause, promote yourself, connect with others who share your interests, or just create a cool story. We hope you’ll be able to collaborate with new, interesting, and like-minded people who you would have otherwise never met.
Some examples include:—
- A disposable camera tied to random benches with instructions to capture the events of a single day.
- A frying pan used to collect the recipes and stories of bacon lovers everywhere
- An Oscar statuette making its way around LA with actors promoting themselves with 3-minute monologues
- A soft drink can that documents the life of every startup it passes through on its way to Bill Gates
Joining the service, aside from letting you register your objects, also allows you to follow stories, and get updates when there’s a new chapter in a story you are following.
Sendmehome has just announced a Facebook Application, Friend Connect integration, and has a $1000 prize for the best SendMeHome Story.
SendMeHome.com is fun, viral, creative, useful, and sets a smile on the face of everyone who comes across it. The design’s a little clunky, but the essential ingredients are there for growth, because of the simple utility value, and the huge fun element.
World Peace through Wandering Items.
David,
This has been tried at least 10 times before. Even I had my own small lost and found project called BikeTag aimed at Amsterdam bikes.
I actually got my helmet back multiple times (I put the biketag on everything I had :)).
It got a lot of attention, but in the end it never really took off. Some other companies tried to do exactly the same as sendmehome (forgot the names), but it is very difficult to build a company out of it.
ohooohohoohoho.grapes
Patrick, the difference here is that the part about retrieving lost stuff is only one detail. More interesting is the fact that you can add a story to an item. Imagine one day buying an old bike, looking up the number and seeing all the previous owners from the past 10 years. I seriously think this is different from the usual ‘Lost & Found’ initiatives you are talking about.