Thursday, August 18, 2011

Love'em or Hate'em The New Geocaching.com Challenges Are Here


There is a whole lot of discussion going on when it comes to the brand spanking new geocache type from Groundspeak called "Challenges". For many veteran geocachers who were looking for the original Virtual type geocache to return is not going to be completely happy. Mainly because Challenges are not Virtuals, they never were meant to be and for good reason.

In this Latitude 47 post, CEO Jeremy Irish points out how Virtuals simply got out of hand and something out of Groundspeak's scope for the activity of geocaching. This was the reason Virtuals were discontinued. The new concept of Challenges will allow geocaching in areas physical containers would or should not be placed and yet you can still earn a smiley.

Say Cheese! The way challenges work at least now in the beginning steps of its introduction. Geocachers are given challenges to be completed and at the appropriate moment a photo is taken as proof of the challenge being completed. It is sent in via Challenges app. At the time of this post it was available for the Ios which included my Ipad2 though not optimized. I would assume Android will not be too far down the line.

Again at the time of this posting Geocaching.com was down assumably doing updates to the website to include the new Challenges information. On the app itself there was only one Challenge and that was called "Kiss a Frog" where you, yep you guessed it, take a photo of yourself kissing any reference of frog. I am sure other challenges will be more creative but hey you have to start somewhere. More details to come as we play this new adaptation to geocaching.

-HHH


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1 comment:

  1. AnonymousAugust 21, 2011 at 8:02 PM

    I have to kinda say that I am against them. From Groundpeak's very own definition, "Geocaching is a real-world, outdoor treasure hunting game using GPS-enabled devices. Participants navigate to a specific set of GPS coordinates and then attempt to find the geocache (container) hidden at that location."

    I feel that challenges should be removed from geocaching.com and perhaps some of the funds that went into developing that "game" could be put to better use on technologically advancing the gc.com webpage and the sport itself.

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