Create a Geoprofile for your Location-Based Life [Interview]

WeePlaces.com offers Foursquare and other geo-location users the ability to visualize their check-ins and see the locations they frequent most. The site has recently unveiled its latest project, Geoprofiles, which expands on this to create profiles for users based on their location-based data. Users can group their data into categories and connect with friends across the WeePlaces.com platform. We got a chance to speak with Eric Wu, founder of WeePlaces.com, about the company, the new Geoprofiles, and the future of the geo-location space. Read below the jump for the interview. Can you give us a brief history/background of WeePlaces.com? WeePlaces.com was built by the Movity team and the founders are from Stamen Design, Expedia, and Bing. We were part of the YCombinator Program from January to March and spent the past 6 months focused on collecting and analyzing geodata. We built and launched WeePlaces.com last month and have seen a terrific response. The visualization that WeePlaces.com offers is an innovative way to make geo-location data accessable and understandable. What inspired it? We were inspired by the lack of innovative applications for checkin data and wanted make checkins more useful. There seems to be a bunch of reasons people checkin, from deals to badges. But we viewed checkins as a record of activities, experiences, and things we do. So we launched Weeplaces with the goal of making these experiences more useful, sharable, and social. You mention that you hope that geoprofiles become a "Feed of your location life." How do you forsee users engaging with this type of profile, primarily? Do you think that geo-location-based profiles will begin to take over traditional "static" profiles? Will the two be combined? We want geoprofiles to be a webpage for all geodata (checkins, pictures, descriptions, tweets, comments). And we see this webpage as a place where friends can view your activity and leave comments, ask questions, and create notes. In terms of how geo-location-based content will interact with current profiles, we're seeing feeds becoming the core component of profiles. If users begin to create/tie content to checkins, we'll see geodata become a major part of what goes into our feeds. What do you predict for the future for geo-location-based technology and the users/businesses that embrace it? The technology will continue to grow exponentially across all devices, and we'll see geo tied almost all content created. For businesses, geodata provides an opportunity for highly targeted advertising. I think we'll see a slew of services that will use geodata to deliver relevant real-time advertising/deals and/or use geodata as a proxy for future behavior. Can you give us any ideas of new features that might be added to geoprofiles in the future? Or anything upcoming from WeePlaces now that you've launched geoprofiles? We're focused on building tools for users to find value in checkins. In the next release, we'll make it easier to add content, take notes of what you did, and create conversations with friends. Integration with Twitter and Flickr are on deck as well. But we're always open to ideas, new features, and feedback from users. Feel free to send me your comments at eric@weeplaces.com.

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Create a Geoprofile for your Location-Based Life [Interview]

Lauren Dugan

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Lauren Dugan