Follow Friday: Everplaces

I came across this article yesterday, which labeled Everplaces as "a new app that essentially functions as a Pinterest for the real world."

Of course I had to check it out. So far, I'm pretty impressed. My first thought was that this could replace all check-in apps, review apps, my Pinterest travel board, etc., but I don't think Everplaces is quite there. YET. The site and app are fairly new, so they're still working out the bugs.

The best part? I asked several questions via their 'feedback' tab this morning and all have been answered. Not bad considering they got some serious press yesterday and I'm guessing they're a little busy.

Some GREAT things about the site/app:

• Beautiful design: You can tell that the Everplaces team really wanted to make recommendations easy on the eyes. Done and done.
• Easy to use: You can search for and post places on your iPhone, add their bookmarklet to save places from across the web, import places from Google Maps or search places already listed on the site. All of these options are great, but there are a few weaknesses I'll cover in a bit.
• Great for remembering: "Do you remember that place from that one time we went to that one city?" Yeah...Everplaces can help with that.
• On the spot reviews: Want to review a place while you're still there? The app is great for jotting down notes before you get home and can't remember a darn thing.
• Social: Facebook and Twitter can be linked for sharing. You can also follow the collections of others and get trusted recommendations. (You can follow me here. You know...if you were wondering.)

Some things they're working on/room for improvement:

• Re-posting a place to your collection: It's easy enough to do, but you're saving the information someone else entered. You can't edit it until after you save it, which is counterintuitive and probably won't happen a lot of the time. Pinterest allows you to change the copy of the pin as you're pinning, but people are still too lazy to do that.
• The bookmarklet: Its biggest draw back is that it pulls no information from sites you visit and want to save. No pictures, no text...nothing. I'm guessing they're treading lightly amidst the legal issues Pinterest is dealing with right now. Can you blame them?
• Search functions: Right now the search functions on the site have some (but not many) limitations. For example, you can't search by city from the 'explore' page. When I reached out via their 'feedback' tab, the staff member who responded assured me that more robust search functions are the works. She also mentioned that once you get deeper into the site, you can search by city and many other categories.
• Place information: There were only a few things that I felt were missing when I added a new place. 1.) You can only put a place in one category even though many places will overlap (for example: restaurants that have great food AND drinks) and 2.) You can't link to outside websites. This is a big one for me and is the main reason I use Pinterest. I want to be able to save links I find when I'm trip planning and help promote the places I love by linking up to their websites. I also think it's imperative to have access to an official website for a restaurant, hotel, etc. when you're cruising review sites. As the staff member mentioned when I reached out about this, you can put it in the notes section, but it won't function as a linked URL. It sounds like they're working on this as well.
• Sharing places you love vs. trip planning: At first I thought Everplaces would help with trip planning research. It kind of doesn't. I hope they'll head down that path, but for now it seems geared toward sharing recommendations for places you've already been. It would be nice to have both 'I've been here and I loved it' and 'I want to go here and need to remember this place for later' collections.

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I guess we'll just have to see how Everplaces evolves. It seems pretty useful, so I'm going to give it a thumbs up and a #followfriday stamp of approval. You can sign up for yourself here and follow them here.

Happy Friday, all!