(ThinkStock)
Findery founder Caterina Fake has an embarrassing confession to make: She’s never seen an episode of Full House.
“I live three doors down from
Alamo Square [the San Francisco area where the show was set], and I
wasn’t even really particularly aware of it,” she told Yahoo Tech. “But
then people were coming up to me all the time and saying, ‘Where’s the Full House house?’ ”
Fake — a co-founder of Flickr (now a Yahoo property; she is no longer with the company), an early Kickstarter investor, and a longtime Etsy
board member — has created a product to help spread interesting
location-based facts just like the fact that Alamo Square was the Full House location. Findery, which she launched in spring for iOS and last week for Android,
aims to collect and organize people’s knowledge of certain locales.
Fake hopes the service will become a map peppered with helpful
user-generated memories and tips.
“Now that I have Findery, I’m the consummate local expert,” she said. “I’m like, ‘You think the Full House stuff is interesting, but did you know there’s a crazy artist who works entirely in glitter living in the house next to the Painted Ladies?’ I’ve kind of become that person.”
Though
there’s no “right” way to use Findery, Fake says the app is made for
curious people, travelers, or snoopers who are interested in the
history, secrets, and little-known facts about their current environs.
The company is still learning
how to push its community past a group of insider Silicon Valley and New
York techies — a problem that apps like Secret or Path still struggle with. She hopes offering the app on Android, which has broader reach, will help.
“If you want to have more local
notes in Laos or Africa, where notes are thinner than they are in the
U.S., Android is the place to be,” she said.
So far, Fake cites expansion to
little-known places like rural Maryland, East Texas, and Dubai, where a
Canadian expat is leaving “wonderful, fascinating,” notes about the
area.
In
practice, Findery isn’t quite the treasure map you might want, but it’s
far from boring. A recent weekend in Boston gave me an opportunity to
test how well it would acquaint me with new surroundings. After allowing
it to access my location on my phone, I zoomed in on the map to a
two-mile vicinity of my friend’s apartment. A note from a user named
ministerofculture informed me that Edgar Allan Poe was born down the
street, going on to excerpt a note his mother wrote to him on the back
of a watercolor: “For my little son Edgar, who should ever love Boston,
the place of his birth, and where his mother found her best, and most
sympathetic friends.” Hey, you learn something new every day.
Another, by TheDailyRobot, tipped me off to a gang of felines nearby in a tip titled “Catwatch 001
from internet.”
