Why I don’t use a Swiss Army Knife for my daily meal
About limited functions and unlimited freedom
Do you know what is a ‘placemark’? A placemark is a chicken teryiaki. I know, this may sound a little weird. Better go back to the start.
One year ago I was wandering around at MIT. If you’ve ever been there, you know that the campus is huge, and kind of messy. I mean, just look at how messy those buildings are.
So, no wonder that someone with a very short memory and a very bad sense of direction like me was getting lost on a daily basis.
My most difficult daily task there was to reach the Japanese (or Vietnamese? Thai?) food truck at lunch time. The first couple of times I got there with my colleagues, which already knew the place. The problem arose as soon as I had to get there by myself, to purchase my beloved chicken teriyaki. As you probably guessed, I got lost, and wasted a lot of time trying to find where the bloody food truck was again, and to get back. And this happened two or three times at least, before I was finally able to memorize the way.
What if I had put a bookmark on that place on the first time, the way I save a website on a web browser? In other words, what if I had put a nice placemark there, called ‘chicken teriyaki’? Silly you -I hear you saying- don’t you have a smartphone? Didn’t anybody tell you about Google Maps? Or Foursquare?
You’re right. I tried both, and failed. Here’s why:
How to add a new placemark on Google maps:
- Open the app
- Look for a bookmark button: there’s none
- Realize you have to long-press on the map
- Drop a pin, drag the bottom bar, press the star
- If you’re lucky, the bookmark will not be called just “dropped pin”, but you get an address. Very useful. Now will you remember that this was the chicken teriyaki food truck? How do you name it? If you want to do things properly, go on:
- Open Mapmaker on a web browser, not mobile-optimized, not available inside the app
- Deal with a very complicated interface until you are finally able to add a new location
- Wait for the Google Maps staff to approve your edit, or earn enough feedback points
- Have Google Maps refuse your edit, because the food truck, in the meantime, has moved to Cincinnati, and they wouldn’t have accepted a food truck location anyway
- Get lost and fall into despair.
How to add a new placemark on Foursquare:
- Open the app
- Press the check-in button, now that’s easy
- Select the place in which you want to check-in: the food truck is not in the list, and there are no ‘add’ buttons. So you search for ‘food truck’, or ‘teriyaki chicken’, but it’s not listed at all. Scrolling to the very bottom of the result list, you finally find the possibility to add a new place
- Choose a category. And a sub-category
- Add the place
- Check-in (Yay! You got 1 point!)
- But how will you retrieve it? From your history? There isn’t a default list of personal places. Better make one
- Choose ‘save to list’
- Create a new ‘food trucks’ list.
- Realize lists cannot be private (and you didn’t mean to share your secret teriyaki chicken food truck with anybody else).
And you have to do all of that while waiting in line for your chicken teriyaki. The Japanese cashier has Square, and it’s super fast. You basically have 10 seconds before it’s your turn and you need to shout that you want the chicken and it’s instantly delivered to your hands, which are now fully occupied, making your smartphone unusable. Now that’s a fast service. Unlike placemarking.
That’s how I realized I had to do something about it. I’m not saying that those are not great apps. Because they are. I love them. I’m a big fan of both. And they do many other things very quickly and easily. But none of them is the right solution for my problem. Using them for my purpose is like using a Swiss Army Knife as cutlery for my daily meal.
Sure, it has a fork and a knife, but it doesn’t feel right. I prefer a simple fork and a knife, which is what I need in that moment. And if I’m eating Japanese I prefer sticks.
The guys at Google Maps are working hard to give you a perfect map. A map where everything you need is there already. The only problem is that they are making it. Not you. They give you the possibility to set your home and work locations: that’s it. I don’t think you’ll ever be able to easily save places like “my grandma’s old flat”. Or “the sweet spot I had my first kiss at”. Or “the best MIT chicken teriyaki food truck”. The same goes with Foursquare: it’s heavily focused on sharing, and in order to share the same content among lots of users you need to be pretty objective about it. That’s why they progressively made it more and more difficult to add new locations. They want a stable database.
The problem is that space itself is not really something stable. In a couple of weeks the Japanese food truck could be replaced by a döner kebab truck (inspiring me thoughts on design, by the way), and my placemark would become useless. That’s fine. Places are temporary. And subjective.
To me, the big conference centre in Milan where I attended the Frontiers of Interaction Conference is Frontiers of Interaction. I’ve never been there for any other reason. But next week, for someone else, it will be the place of the international exposition of secondhand books: that’s what it will become for the people there. Why should we make it objective? ‘Conference Centre’ alone doesn’t really mean much.
Common knowledge and stable databases are fine, but we also need space for temporary and subjective information.
Doesn’t that make the beauty of the internet in the end? On Twitter, what I tweet doesn’t need to be interesting for everybody. Maybe it’s interesting for my followers. Maybe it’s interesting for me alone. But I’m totally free to share it.
The same goes with placemarks. It doesn’t matter if there’s a chicken teriyaki, an antimatter generator or some rainbow-colored unicorn poop. It’s just my placemark.
(And by the way, that’s one of the things we want to achieve with Mapnaut.)
How to add a new placemark on Mapnaut:
- Open the app
- Write what’s there
- Save (and tweet, if you like).
