Fake’s Findery: Flickr co-founder brings her social, notes-based map of the world to iOS

After more than a year as a Web app, Flickr co-founder Caterina Fake is today unveiling the iOS incarnation of her latest startup – Findery.

Though the app has been available previously in Australia as a test-bed of sorts, this heralds the official launch of the native app internationally, and it sports a complete redesign based on feedback from the beta period.

Findery, which changed its name from Pinwheel back in 2012 following a trademark dispute, essentially lets you explore places through notes on a map, using video, audio, text and images.

Rather than tapping existing data-points such as online travel guides, Findery’s starting point is that of a blank canvas, superimposed upon a map. This map can be traversed using geo-tagged notes consisting of the collective wisdom of users around the world. These notes may include anything from anecdotes and historical factoids, to personal memories.

Furthermore, notes can be made public or private, with members choosing to follow others directly (e.g. your friends), or follow public Notemaps (more on that below).

The core underlying purpose of Findery is to bring places to life. It’s kind of like Foursquare meets, Twitter, meets TripAdvisor, meets… you get the picture.

“Every place has a story, or a thousand stories,” explains Fake. “Findery brings places to life, be they where you stand or where you hope to go.”

In addition to notes, you can also build what are called Notemaps, which amounts to a curated collection of notes about a specific topic, theme or location. So this basically becomes a crowdsourced notepad that can be a diary, or a list of things ‘to-do’ in a specific region.

Thanks to the wonders of GPS, Findery automatically delivers notes based on where you are. And because this already existed as a Web-based platform, there’s quite a lot of data in there already – as you can see from this NYC Memory Map.

Though Findery is restricted to iOS for now from a ‘native’ perspective, the mobile Web version works well across other platforms.  We are told, however, that the Findery team hope to launch a version specifically for Android soon.

Findery for iOS is available to download now.

➤ Findery | App Store