Is Pinwheel the Next Big Thing?

BY Erin Mckeever
2012/02/21

On February 16, Pinwheel launched into private beta following a wave of funding from multiple Angel Investors. In a matter of days, its launch has been covered in Social Times, Gizmodo, Mashable, Tech Crunch, and several other prominent digital publications from the technology world. It may be early days for Pinwheel, but could this heavy media coverage and interest be an indicator that Pinwheel is an application to watch this year?

Pinwheel is the latest and potentially greatest social application from Flickr co-founder Caterina Fake, who also currently serves as Chief Product Officer at Hunch. It allows users to pin notes and images to maps, tag them so they are searchable, and decide whether you want to make them public, private, or for select friends only. You don’t have to be in a certain location to leave or read notes (unlike potential competitor Repudo), but you can leave notes for people at specific locations, in which case they would need to be there to receive it. Businesses can also leave sponsored notes, a form of location-based ads.

While people so far have been using the tool in the ways you might expect – tips, news, and personal notes – I have a feeling that we’ll see a lot more creativity from both individuals and brands as this new tool becomes more publicly accessible. Will you try Pinwheel? How do you see yourself using an application like this? Comment away!

  • 22/02/12

    Ralph says:

    I think location based content has a lot of potential and we'll see a shift in social networking from being a find all your friends paradigm to a discover friends (new and existing) based on the content they generate. I had a similar idea last summer and came across Repudo and then My City Lives (based in Toronto) a couple months after that. With Caterina Fake behind a similar service you can bet the hype will gain momentum. Guess we'll just have to wait and see if the masses adopt this type of service.