Thursday, May 01, 2008

SimpatiGo

I saw an interesting mashup today - SimpatiGo.com. It is kind of a walking tour wiki. You can put in the begin and end points of your journey and it will give you a customized walking tour which gives you directions and lists all of the interesting sites along the way. The novel part of their concept is doing this wiki-style which means anyone can add their own points of interest. I went in and added a few points of interest in downtown Salt Lake and quickly had a walking tour past Temple Square.




I'm assuming they will also let you edit points of interest in the future. The usability isn't quite where it needs to be for broad acceptance but the concept is interesting.

You may wonder why I put this on my genealogy blog. Well, I can think of all kinds of interesting applications in the world of genealogy. For example, who wouldn't want to take a walking tour of the places where their ancestors lived? You could also take a similar concept and create walking tours through your family. For example, many applications can calculate the relationship between two people in a pedigree, imagine if part of that calculation also walked you through the relationship and highlighted interesting tidbits and artifacts that supported or accented the path between the two people. That would be cool!