when is this germ CACHEDRONE going to be removed ?
Showing posts with label CacheDrone Volunteer. Show all posts
Showing posts with label CacheDrone Volunteer. Show all posts
Dislike CacheDrone at Groundspeak | Geocaching
CacheDrone is Disliked at Groundspeak | Geocaching. We the cachers HATE the reviewer CacheDrone because of his RUDE and vindictive responses.
Groundspeak's HOSTILE REVIEWER cachedrone CANADA
Groundspeak | Geocaching. REVIEWER cachedrone HOSTILE
Groundspeak / Geocaching HOSTILE REVIEWER - cachedrone / CANADA.
Garmin erase Groundspeak.com
Remember what happened to myspace. I hope Garmin squish this "worm" Groundspeak/Geocaching.
Please see this outstanding article by me Nick Brown and JOIN www.opencaching.com. Also move your caches out of Groundspeak, transfer to www.opencach.
As far as I know, the Groundspeak/Garmin partnership was never a formal corporate tie-up – beyond specific projects such as the addition of geocache icons to GPS devices or integration of the Wherigo player – but it’s clear that both companies gained from their relationship, which had symbiotic elements. It makes sense for the biggest GPS manufacturer to work with the biggest geocache listing site.
I don’t know how big Garmin’s handheld/outdoor market is, but I’m going to guess that in 2008 it was about twice as big as they had probably forecast when making long-term plans back in 2001 or so. That extra doubling, or whatever, in size is entirely due to geocaching – an activity which emerged from nowhere, cost Garmin practically nothing in R&D and marketing, and has probably resulted in more revenue for Garmin than it has for Groundspeak. (In 2008, pretty well every geocacher had forked over $150 to $400 for a GPS unit; some proportion of those might have bought one or two years’ worth of Premium Membership on Geocaching.com at US$30 and/or a couple of travel bugs.)
Then, the geocaching device market – of which I’m guessing Garmin’s share was 85-90 per cent in 2008 – began to change. Smartphones with GPS capacity started to appear. Sure, you wouldn’t want to go caching in the deep woods with one of these do-not-drop devices but for FTF hunters in the city, they’re pretty handy (so I’m told; I might even get one, some day).
Of course, Garmin has always made out that its listing service is some kind of “community-driven” initiative. First, there’s the name: “OpenCaching” – perhaps only “FluffyKittenCaching” would have been nicer. There was already a loosely-coupled network of other Opencaching sites in various countries, run on a non-profit basis by volunteers. Garmin claimed to have had “some great discussions” with these sites but they’re the only ones who remember those conversations. Score -1 for Garmin, who should perhaps have realised their initial target market was people who don’t like Groundspeak, many of whom were already on the grassroots Opencaching sites, so alienating them was a poor idea. Next, there’s the propaganda: “Caching should be free”, “Driven by the community”, yada yada. The usual stuff you hear from large companies in this social media age: “We’re on the side of the little guys.” Really. “Corporate jet? What corporate jet?” (One of the truly bizarre features of the low-level, undeclared PR war between Garmin and Groundspeak has been how Garmin, a $3 billion company whose headquarters are located in a tax haven, has portrayed itself as being just a bunch of philanthropists, up against an unnamed, faceless, evil adversary that wants to steal all your cache data. When did Garmin’s president and chief financial officer last go into a dunk tank in front of the customers?)
It seems pretty clear that OpenCaching.com (OX, for short) has been set up with one aim: to bring Groundspeak to the negotiating table. There is no other plausible reason for Garmin to have set up the site with no revenue stream – they even provided free smartphone apps in the first couple of months, thus making it easy to use OX without buying a Garmin GPS. If OX can take 15-20 per cent of the caching traffic, goes the reasoning, Groundspeak might have to sit up and take notice; and it would probably be an interesting test of Groundspeak’s business model and easy-going corporate attitude if its de facto monopoly of the geocache listing market became less solid. So, Garmin made it extra-simple (give or take all of the design errors and bugs; it took me about 10 minutes to find how to create an 8-digit OX cache code, for example) for people to upload their caches and existing logs from Geocaching.com, in the hope they would stop using that site altogether.
This was always going to encounter some “chicken-and-egg” issues, given the huge installed base of caches (and cachers) at Geocaching.com – indeed, it seems to be legitimate to ask what percentage of people who will ever become geocachers have not yet tried geocaching, because this will determine how big the overall market can become – but it might have had a chance of working, had Garmin actually investigated what real geocachers want.
What they *don’t* want is a site with a lot of AJAX (Web 2.0) technology which looks great but doesn’t quite work – most geocachers have learned to be fairly undemanding about slick functionality, which has historically not been Groundspeak’s strong suit (although they have caught up a lot in the last 18 months or so); nor do they want to know that one cache is rated 0.1 difficulty points more than another (what does that even mean?).
Opencaching.com - Garmin’s new cache listing site!
http://groundspeakgeocaching.blogspot.ca/2010/04/opencachingcom-garmins-new-cache.htmlAlternative 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).
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).
Notify published Rock Around the KRock
[kag] Fw: [GEO] Notify: CacheDrone published Rock Around the KRock (Multi-cache)
- From: "Lloyd Baker" <binrat@xxxxxxxxxxxx>
- To: <kag@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Wed, 2 Apr 2008 22:15:53 -0400
I may even have an in with their Commanding Officer. ;-) Binrat----- Original Message ----- From: "Geocaching" <noreply@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
To: <binrat@xxxxxxxxxxxx> Sent: Wednesday, April 02, 2008 10:06 PMSubject: [GEO] Notify: CacheDrone published Rock Around the KRock (Multi-cache)
This is an automated message from Geocaching For GC1AE1W: Rock Around the KRock (Multi-cache) Location: Ontario, Canada 0.3mi E (0.49km E) CacheDrone published Rock Around the KRock (Multi-cache) at 4/2/2008 Log Date: 4/2/2008 Published Visit this log entry at the below address: http://www.geocaching.com/seek/log.aspx?LUID=160d0958-5cd3-4939-afd3-b252eb947d4e Visit Multi-cache Rock Around the KRock http://www.geocaching.com/seek/cache_details.aspx?guid=06a52c13-3cdc-4fb0-963e-de983035e884 Profile for CacheDrone: http://www.geocaching.com/profile/?guid=191ef150-f8c6-4990-ac4c-7ce0b16c2f89 Notification: KAG - Multi http://www.geocaching.com/notify/edit.aspx?NID=40174 Kingston Area Geocachers
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