Alternative Geocaching websites

View Postfunkybro,
The reason I ask is that I am investigating the possibility of creating an "open" or "free" equivalent of Geocaching.com -- one without advertising, without extra paid-for benefits, and a completely open developer's API. This would allow anybody to create their own free (or paid-for if they want) Geocaching apps. These apps would be able to make full use of live data (i.e. it would be far more robust and seamless than using pocket queries), and could run on mobile devices, desktop, or even interface to sites like Flickr and Twitter.

Out of interest, what would be your revenue model for that? Spontaneous donations for no reward other than a warm feeling? Let us know how that works out for you. There's a guy sitting outside my local petrol station who's trying that, but he doesn't seem to drive a car...

View Postfunkybro,
How do people feel about one company (Groundspeak) controlling, and making money out of, their geocaching data (and all their effort in hiding and finding caches)?

About the same as I feel about Google making money by indexing and rehosting Web pages written by me which I didn't submit to them and didn't agree to them listing. Which is to say: "meh".

Groundspeak is about 0.01% the size of Google, but they both illustrate the fundamental point that on the Internet, the whole is greater than the sum of its parts: a huge amount of data items, all of which are worth exactly $0.00 individually, nevertheless acquires value only because someone has invested time and money in a system to aggregate it. I choose to regard the effort which I've put into the caches which I've placed and listed, as "payment" for the caches which I've been able to find because other people do the same. If someone's prepared to host all that for me for $30, or (for non PMs) a few minutes of eyeball time trying to avoid looking at Google ads, then good on them.

View Postfunkybro,
Of course it has the broadest selection of caches. But that's about all it has going for it IMO.

That seems to be a bit like saying "my local shopping centre has a large selection of shops selling things which people want to buy, but that's about all it has going for it". :)

People come to Geocaching (the game) to get outdoors and have fun, and they come to Geocaching.com to find lists of places where they can go to do that. That's really all that most people want. 90% of players don't even have a premium membership, so they are apparently reasonably satisfied with being able to search for caches near their house, browse the descriptions, and - gasp! - print them off (it's about two years since I printed a cache listing, but I'm always amazed to see how many people do it).

There's a higher proportion of "computer types" in this game than in the population as a whole, and it's natural for us geeks to look at the site from that world view. But if you get out to events and meet people, you'll find hardly anybody who wants more "exciting" features from the site. In fact, quite a few people moan whenever something is changed because the place where they used to click has moved or whatever. It's like a well-worn pair of walking boots: you wouldn't buy them new in that state, and there are smarter alternatives available, but the ones you have do the job and don't give you blisters. :D

I agree that some corners of the site are a little clunky, but it's not easy migrating the UI of hundreds of GB of SQL data (and dozens of TB of photographic data) while maintaining something close to 24/7 uptime. Groundspeak is about 0.01% of the size of Google or Facebook or Amazon; in fact you can see their entire staff, including admin, interns, support, and the people who package the merchandise here (I count 25 faces, plus the frog).

And of the other sites which have been mentioned, most are hardly models of great UI design. I quite like the appeal of OpenCaching's model, not least because it's not stuck with English, but there's a big difference between an open-source development project and a collaborative, volunteer-run system operations project. Successful examples of the latter are rare. That's why there are lots of great tools - proprietary and open-source - to let you manage offline collections of caches, but few successful online solutions because keeping a site up is hard (even without the 800,000 cache listings head start which Groundspeak has).