Posted by Michael Dales on 2010-07-23 07:39:42
Remember when you were kid, you'd leave secret messages for your friends to find? Maybe you'd make trails for them to follow, perhaps leading to some treasure? Perhaps you'd leave a message hidden in a place where only your friends could find it? As you grow up you tend to find yourself without chalk to hand to scrawl a message in an out of the way corner, and leaving bits of paper under rocks for your friends to find is harder to do in the city. But wouldn't it be great though if we could still engage with people in that form? Leaving messages for friends or strangers, telling them that you love the plum cake at this cafe, that this is the spot where you first met your partner, or leaving a trail for people to follow that describes your favourite walk through the village or city?
That's what PlaceWhisper lets you do. With your mobile phone you can create and discover hidden messages, called Whispers, each tied to a specific physical location. PlaceWhisper lets you create Whisper, which are either shared with everyone how visits the place, or they can be hidden so that only your friends can find them. You can use PlaceWhisper to find Whispers where you are - nearby Whispers will show up on your phone, and when you walk up to the spot where they were created, their contents can be revealed! If you've ever done geocaching, then it's very similar to that, only without the Tupperware!
You can also join Whispers together to form a trail, that gradually reveals itself as people collect it, recreating the fun of a treasure hunt. With trails you can guide people around a city or the countryside without having to litter the physical world with signposts.
This is PlaceWhisper, a fun app that lets you interact with the world in a new way, and the applications are only limited by your imagination!
We've just released the first version of PlaceWhisper for the iPhone. Over the coming months we're going to be working hard at improving both the iPhone version, building versions for other mobile platforms, and creating a web front end that lets you find out who's been collecting your Whispers, create trail scoreboards, and all other manner of exciting stuff.
So, why not go give it a try? PlaceWhisper is available as a free download from the Apple App Store (UK only currently, releasing in other countries very shortly), and you can follow PlaceWhisper on Twitter: @placewhisper.