Cambridge-based ZoomAtlas, like many emerging social networking sites, is focused intensely on one thing: Its users.
When you’re trying to grow a social networking site, frustrated or confused users is a big problem. A negative experience not only means they’ll be less likely to peruse the site, it also means that users are creating less content for other users to consume — supply and demand are both corrupted by a bad experience.
So, like every other social networking site with a chance at hitting the mainstream, ZoomAtlas is watching the way users engage with their site intently.
A few months ago, the team at ZoomAtlas was watching their users when they realized something: Most of them were older than the average social network user. The majority of ZoomAtlas users are over the age of 50.
Here’s why:
ZoomAtlas is what Founder and serial entrepreneur Mark Sherman calls, “a location-based reconciliation website.” In other words, it allows users to re-connect with old friends based on geography. Unlike other, less tangible social networks, ZoomAtlas is a single visual entity — a map of the United States. But unlike Google Maps, ZoomAtlas allows you to zoom way into the map — beyond the point where satellite imagery becomes fuzzy. When you zoom way in on ZoomAtlas, the site reveals an artificial, illustrated overlay that looks like a game layer on Sim City. The name pretty much says it all.
“We decided to marry the idea of a geographic wiki with a social application. The idea was to create a map that is user-editable, give them a very good starting point, but on top of that, build a social application that allows people to post notes and write about any location,” says Sherman.
The idea for ZoomAtlas came to Mark in 2007, the same year the company was founded. He was visiting his childhood neighborhood with his daughter and found himself wishing he could leave notes for old friends on their houses and places he used to hang out, in case they stopped by. ZoomAtlas, at its core, does exactly that.
A screenshot of ZoomAtlas' "LifePath" functionality. This is currently being overhauled by the ZoomAtlas team.
“What’s happening a lot on our site is that people are posting notes on their childhood homes. It’s great,” says Sherman. “We’ve only been advertising it for about six months, but we have almost 60,000 notes on the site.”
As of last week, ZoomAtlas, which currently has nine employees, had 657,523 users, according to Sherman.
Beyond that core functionality, ZoomAtlas also offers users the ability to create what the company calls a “LifePath.” These LifePaths are essentially time lines that users fill out, which detail their whereabouts over the course of their lives. Users can add notes based on time spent at a particular residence, place of employment, and learning institution — in addition to places users “played” or hung out.
Of course, older users tend to have more people they’re looking to re-connect with online and more data to add to their LifePaths. It just makes sense that older people are finding ZoomAtlas more useful right now.
But the implications for the way young people may someday use ZoomAtlas are even more exciting.
Some parts of the ZoomAtlas map are currently more detailed than others, but eventually, most of the U.S. and even the world could look like this.
Of course, many so-called “Internet Natives” — Millenials and Gen-Yers who are already well connected with friends from all corners of their lives — will never need to re-connect with old friends online, or if they want to, many of their friends will be on mainstream social networking sites like Facebook.
Long before overall user interest in re-connecting begins to die down, ZoomAtlas plans to be a fully dynamic, digital replica of the real world, which can be viewed based on any point in time over the last 50-or-so years.
Sherman hopes ZoomAtlas will someday be a digital replica of the real world that users can interact on in many different ways at many different points in time.
While users can only view ZoomAtlas from a bird’s eye perspective now, Sherman hopes it will someday be a fully navigable 3D space. Unlike Google Maps, which currently allows users to view locations from the “street view” in a fairly clunky, point-to-point navigation, ZoomAtlas’ game-style layer on the real world could be something users can walk around, or even view other geo-tagged information within.
“We provide a map editor, which allows you go into any location and paint the surfaces with textures. All of our textures were designed by artists from the video gaming industry. We had a dozen artists working full-time for about a year generating a palate of these textures. There are also some meta objects, like ball fields. You can plunk down a football field and reposition it, so that when you zoom in you can see every blade of grass,” says Sherman. “We’d love to go 3D with this.”
Here's what Boston College's football stadium currently looks like on ZoomAtlas. Sherman hopes ZoomAtlas will be global in the next year.
Imagine a map that allows users to see where their friends are checking into Foursquare in real-time. (By the way, recent research shows that the most popular venue users check in on using Foursquare and Gowalla is “home.”) How cool would it be to be able to virtually walk up to locations your friends took photos at and view them in geographical context?
We think the future use cases for ZoomAtlas are almost unending, and so does Sherman. That’s why his company has created ZoomAtlas from the ground up — even securing proprietary satellite imagery. The space ZoomAtlas is creating is 100% the property of the company, and it’s already being fleshed out by designers building the synthetic reality on top of it.
“We’re a site about the places in your past that are important to you. Where are we going to go with real-time check-ins? That remains to be seen. We’re keeping our options open. We had thought about branding ourselves with more of a focus on the past. We had a particular name in mind, but we decided against that. We’re keeping ourselves generic and we’re going to let our users tell us where they want us to go,” says Sherman.
ZoomAtlas is preparing to launch a new contest that will really encourage users to add details to locations on the map in its current form. The contest, aimed at groups of people interested in having a reunion, will add a new game element to the site where users can earn points for adding detail to the map locations they have in common.
Sherman and the team at ZoomAtlas hope the contest will encouraging users to add lots of details and notes to the college campus where they all went to school, thereby making the site more visually appealing and encouraging regular communication by users interested in that map location. The contest is expected to kick off in the next few weeks, and the “reunion team” with the most points per user by the end of the calendar year will earn $10,000 towards their reunion.
What do you think of ZoomAtlas? Is it still to raw to be visually appealing and useful? How can social networking better integrate high-detail maps in the future? Please share your thoughts in the comments section below.
To learn more about ZoomAtlas and the upcoming contest they’re running, follow them on Twitter and like them on Facebook.
Tags: Company News, Company Profiles, Edu, Mark Sherman, ZoomAtlas
