The Mapnaut Philosophy
How to make things simple, useful and fun
We are Hic Locative Media.
We take complex things that don’t need to be that complex and make them simpler through better design.
Geolocation is one of these things.
No need to tell you: the daily flood of information doesn’t give us time to go through complicated sequences of actions. We can’t have, and we don’t need to have complex services, intricate patterns, all-purpose swiss army knife software. We are finally beginning to appreciate simple, single-task, purposely limited applications because they make our actions quicker and our lives easier. We want more intuitive patterns, straightforward interactions, minimalistic but appropriate interfaces.
Similarly, the amount of information coming from our ‘friends’ has become, in most cases, overwhelming and uninteresting. We don’t need the umpteenth social network to subscribe to. Neither we need to know what all of our friends are up to at all times, or to tell them. We demand quality over quantity. New services can rely on existing platforms as their social spines, drawing profile information from there and adding new kinds of curated content as integrations of those services. We may be considered nostalgic of the early days of the internet, but we think that sharing with strangers is sometimes much more serendipitous and fun. Medium is showing the way. Tumblr, Instagram, Vine, Secret, Lift, Jelly, are all, in different ways and with different purposes, behaving like this. Mapnaut does the same with geolocation.
The Problem
All current geolocation tools tend to forget the reason why we’ve been using maps for ages: to interpret the world. The perfect map is therefore not the one with the greatest amount of information (read: the greatest pre-set database of all the places in the world), but the one which carries your own interpretation. That’s why your best map-maker will always be yourself. That’s why we called it Mapnaut: focusing on the one who navigates (the “-naut”) more than what we can give (the “map-”).
Mapnaut is a personal tool for dealing with your own space. And ultimately, to do something useful for yourself and for others.
The Solution
We should be able to save places as easily as we bookmark websites on a web browser. That’s what Mapnaut does.
Open the app. Name or describe the place you’re at, 140 characters long: the #hashtags in it instantly become your categories, and the placemark can be tweeted. Then, if you feel like, snap a picture. That’s it.
It doesn’t need to be a venue, it doesn’t need to be in our database, or already recorded by anyone. You can save shops and houses, parks and parking spots, beautiful sunsets and scary corners. You can do it to remember, to share, to communicate, to raise awareness, or just to talk.
Because every placemark you create is little bit-sized information for everybody else to discover. Other people can re-save it, adding their own thoughts and opinions, creating a geolocated conversation on top of every placemark. Think of a Vine video that can be commented and re-vined, but with a pair of coordinates on a map instead of a video. That’s Mapnaut.
The Future
We work hard and dream big. Our passion is one: to make things simpler, and simple always means beautiful to us.
We need your help to make this possible. We want to build a solution that really works, and constant feedback is how we can achieve it. Drop us an email or a tweet for whatever comes to your mind. If you would like to be updated about our work go and subscribe at www.mapnaut.com.
We sincerely hope you will find Mapnaut as simple, useful and fun as we meant it to be. You’ll find it here.
