Groundspeak's New Take on Virtuals

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DudleyGrunt
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Groundspeak's New Take on Virtuals

Post by DudleyGrunt » Thu Jul 21, 2011 9:59 am

Per Eric from Groundspeak on the Geocaching Podcast (Ep. 213) last night, Groundspeak plans an announcement on their new style virtuals on Monday. The episode should be posted sometime today for your listening pleasure.

He emphasized that they'd be more "fun and exciting" than the old ones.

I mention this here, because I wonder what impact folks might feel this could have on the various "alternative" caching sites. One advantage we have over Groundspeak, is that we offer cache types, including virtuals, that they do not.

It'll be interesting to hear what they are doing, but my guess has been, for a while, that they will definitely more restrictive and limited as far as "what" and "how". Given what they do with Earthcaches, I don't expect people will be allowed to require photos and they don't have a log password feature like TerraCaching and the OpenCaching community.

Oh well, guess we'll see on Monday.
Dave, OCNA Team Member
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Re: Groundspeak's New Take on Virtuals

Post by GOF » Sat Jul 23, 2011 12:04 am

There has been a lot of talk lately on the groundspeak forums. Jeremy Irish even joined in.
In the UserVoice updates I never said that virtuals were coming back in their previous form, but instead something would be available that should capture the interest in virtuals without the baggage (such as the subjective review process).

To me, this is the most exciting project that we've worked on in years, but it will take some time to iterate through the idea and I know we'll get some things wrong, but the framework is solid. We'll be investing a substantial amount of effort with this project moving forward.

Some points:

It will be on Geocaching.com, not a new web site. It will be a separate section in the beta, but I expect it to be integrated into a joined search at some point.
Currently they will not go towards your find count, but it might at some point. It won't at the beginning though.
It will be a visible statistic, so you will see them on the profile, on the logs, etc.
We'll be hopefully launching with mobile applications to compliment the activity. I expect that the majority of participants will be using smartphones, but we will have components (Pocket Queries, GPX file downloads, etc) for traditional GPS devices.

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Re: Groundspeak's New Take on Virtuals

Post by DudleyGrunt » Sat Jul 23, 2011 8:24 pm

Thanks for the update. Interesting that they won't go toward your find count, but may later. Retroactively? That'd mess with folks' numbers / milestones. Sounds more like the future of Waymarking meets FourSquare or Munzee than virtuals.
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Re: Groundspeak's New Take on Virtuals

Post by GOF » Mon Jul 25, 2011 6:28 am

Yup. Once again they have created something that doesn't provide what what people have been asking for.

A: "I want blue."
B: "I don't want blue."

G: "Good news! We have created orange. This should make everyone happy."

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Re: Groundspeak's New Take on Virtuals

Post by DudleyGrunt » Mon Jul 25, 2011 10:22 pm

GOF wrote:Yup. Once again they have created something that doesn't provide what what people have been asking for.

A: "I want blue."
B: "I don't want blue."

G: "Good news! We have created orange. This should make everyone happy."
So far, it seems sort of like....

"We know a lot of people want blue and a lot of people really don't want blue. Here is our new product....
Image

"We're calling it "Colors". In some ways it is similar to blue, but we're not going to call it that and we're not going to let you use it in the ways you would use Blue. We'll tell you more later."
Dave, OCNA Team Member
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Maryland Geocaching Society

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