Is Findery just another travel app?

Nope! Do we need another travel app? If you’re a fan of the social web and you love the social aspect of travel, then yes! Yes, we do.

Last week, social discovery platform Findery, released its Android app. The iOS version was released in May of this year. Its growing community of users have already shared “notes” in every country in the world. 

Flickr founder, Caterina Fake, is the brains behind Findery. Just as photo-sharing site Flickr allowed people to tell stories through their personal photos, Findery allows people to tell the story of a place behind the picture. Some people are professional writers and photographers, some are not. However, everyone tells a story in their own way.

Findery’s Functionality

Findery allows users to discover new places through personal stories, unknown histories, and best of all, local tips. Users can create geo-tagged notes and share stories about meaningful places while collecting places they want to explore or even places they’ve been to and love.

On the “Discover” page, you’ll see Findery’s picks for the week, “Findery Favorites” (individual notes that people leave on a place) and “Noteable Notemaps” (a collection of notes that function somewhat like a photo album). This note I posted of my son in Annapolis, titled “Watching the Kayaks“, was chosen as a Findery Favorite.

Scroll down and you’ll find members, notes, and notemaps nearby your current location. If you need a little guidance creating a notemap, you can consult the Findery blog for instructions on How to Create a Notemap on your mobile phone.

You can set up tags, make the notemap private, people can leave comments, favorite it, or add the note to their own notemap. Users have created notemaps of places they want to visit before they die, inspiration, places that make them smile.

I’m currently creating a notemap for Greece, building out a potential itinerary based off of some interesting places on which people have left notes.

When you connect Findery to your Facebook and Twitter accounts, you can find your friends who are already using the platform and connect with them. I found 14 of the 6,084 people I follow on Twitter currently using the platform and only 1 of my 687 Facebook friends.

Findery feels “underground” right now and I have to admit that I love that about it. Eventually the masses will come.

Findery = Pinterest For Travelers?

Kinda. Findery almost feels like a Pinterest for travelers when you look inside individual Notemaps (in Grid view) on your laptop. Since Pinterest is dominated by DIY, fashion and food, travelers may find that Findery works better for them. I won’t get into comparisons in this post but anyone can use Findery in several different ways.

I enjoy using Findery from my laptop to share places that I visited that are no longer on my phone. It’s a neat way for me to share those travel photos (and experiences) that may have never made it into an article or a blog post. It’s also turning out to be a cool way for me to crowd source my Greece travel itinerary.

“Every Place Has A Story”

Findery’s tag line is so true. Every place does have a story, especially the places right around the corner.

You don’t have to travel far to find a cool place or find a cool story to share with your friends. What I like about what I’m seeing so far is that in addition to the tag line, “every place has a story”, every person has a different story to tell.