Is Garmin taking on Groundspeak?
Within the time period that I have been geocaching, it always seemed to me that geocaching.com and Garmin seemed to have a pretty good relationship. I always saw advertisements for Garmin devices on the site, and it always felt as if there was always a bit of a favor towards the Garmin products on geocaching.com. In fact, the Wherigo project from Groundspeak was launched on the Garmin devices and no other portable GPS unit. It seemed the two were quite good friends. However, it appears that time seems to have changed this.
A couple of months ago I noticed that when I updated the firmware on my Garmin Oregon GPS, the icon for geocaching changed from the Groundspeak geocaching logo to a generic icon. I also began to see less and less Garmin on the website. I didn’t give it much thought. Then today I saw this tweet about where geocaching might be heading. Further reading found that reviews of Garmin GPS units are not visible from the main GPS review page but can be found after digging a bit. There’s also the fact that Garmin has been a bit absent from major GSP sponsored events.
Many of you may not be aware that there has been a growing movement to build a geocaching community/site outside of the Groundspeak base. In fact, if you look hard enough, you will find that there are multiple listing services for geocaching including Terracaching, and something else: Opencaching.
Opencaching seems to have been somewhat of a bigger success in other countries. Although there is no specific one for Canada, there are listing sites for the UK, Europe, Germany, and the United States. They provide many of the same features we are used to seeing on geocaching.com, but provide it in a different interface with different restrictions.
What does this have to do with Garmin vs Groundspeak? Well in reading this article, it seems that Garmin now owns the “www.opencaching.com” domain. It begs to ask the question, is Garmin preparing to launch their own geocaching site in competition with Groundspeak? If they are, what are their intentions and how will this affect geocaching as a whole. Are they trying to take Groundspeak down or is this merely a means of creating a bit of competition for the longtime listing service?
Competitive listing services have existed for awhile but they have never really been able to take off in the way that geocaching.com has. The biggest reason has always been that the data located on gc’s servers is not very portable. There’s never been an easy way for you to take the information you have there and copy it somewhere else. Because of that, other listing services have typically been silo’ed and stand on their own. This has ultimately been there undoing. Most cachers don’t want to have to worry about searching for geocaches on multiple sites. They like the idea of all of their finds, hides, trackables, souvenirs, bookmarks, and caches they want to find are all in one spot. If this gets split across multiple sites, imagine the difficulty in trying to track what you have actually found and what you want to search for. Imagine trying to list a cache and having to list it on two sites instead of just one. If you track your finds and do stats, do you include finds from both sites as part of your overall stats, or do you maintain two completely different sets of stats? Indeed you can see how immediately this can become an issue.
However, the flip side to it is that competition is actually good for the market. If Groundspeak actually had another company that was going toe to toe with them, it would force them to take the necessary steps to keep up. I would love to see what another company’s perspective on geocaching would be and how they would promote and change the sport. We’ve been seeing the sport of geocaching through the eyes of a single company for a long time. It would be nice to see how others would take what GSP did so well, and expand or change it up some.
What’s your take? Would you participate in a new geocaching listing service, or would you stick to what we know already?
I’m a bit on the mindset that i would stay and i think it comes down to the stats. that and I’m not one of those complainers on the GC forums that complain about every new update like it’s the end of the world. The problem i see is that your going to have a potential problem with two caches either close or in the same location listed over on another site and the confusion will ensue when somebody finds a cache that might or might not be the one they’re looking for. (I’ve got more on this pros and cons but it all comes down to personal preference and I’d rather stick with what I’m doing as it works for me.)
I’ve been playing on another site for some time now. Was prety excited when I got my invite… Now I go from site to site like I do with all these sites (MGA, M-GA,ACGA,Cacheupnb and “nameless site”) I make friends in some and foes with the others. Very fun having so many choises… When it comes to stats I dont care too much that I do much better in farmville then in Mafiawars. I would not consider taking my Zynga poker winnings and add it to pokerstars. However if we were all to start playing at the same table then my play proves all there is to know… Go Garmin Go!
Many many years ago there was Navicache which had many caches but only had one in NB so I never got involved. Navicache may still exist
My wife and I are from the old school. We tend to shop at the stores where we get good service and avoid the others, go to the restaurant that serves well and so on (This is random, but I am a Pumphouse fan!). Up to now, I love what geocaching.com has to offer, so I do not feel the need to check elsewhere. A bit of the same way as I’ve elected this site to chat/give my opinion versus others. Zor does a good job at picking up what is elsewhere so I don’t have to, and that is fine with me.
Am I going to try other geocaching sites one day? Perhaps if geocaching is not providing me with what I like. But for now, I will stick with it, solely with it.
I don’t care less about big companies liking or disliking each other, I hate sharks. So if they split up, what the @#$%#, but for me, I guess I will stick my “loyalty” to geocaching.com if that makes any sense.
Now, reading this thread, it kinda explains why Garmin did not put the Wherigo app on their newest devices! Doesn’t really look good for wherigo does it?
Today we went out caching and when I went to load my field notes, I noticed that the Garmin GPS link for the field notes had moved to the bottom of the list of devices (last week, it was the 2nd or 3rd). This is further proof that something is going on.
I have been caching for 3.5 years and in general like the geocaching.com site. It can be slow at times but in general works well. If Garmin comes out with their own site, I hope that it does not mean a new set of geocaching but rather a front-end to the same geocache database. I did some geocaching in France and went to their site. It is very different than the geocaching.com site but all the caches are the same so obviously, the sites are linked
I will stick with geocaching.com. I just hope that this bickering doesn’t mean that groundspeak will stop supporting garmin devices. I doubt they would want the backlash that would result from it.
I agree that competition is good, but I doubt I would cache on two different sites. I really love Garmin for their devices, but imo they should leave this geocaching business to Groundspeak. Geocaching.com may not be perfect for everyone but for me I can’t ask for more. That’s my two cents, whatever it’s worth.
We’ll be sticking with groundspeak, too. After all, they have built the entire geocaching community. Even if garmin has “free” memberships, giving away pocket queries… none of it would exist without Groundspeak. And, no reviewers / real rules is BAD BAD BAD news for geocaching, and that’s opencaching’s secondary claim to fame – no cache submitted will be denied. Let the bomb squads be warned, if such a thing gains in popularity.
There is no doubt in my mind that Garmin is going to launch a site to compete with Groundspeak’s geocaching.com. I have written several posts about the subject on my blog – http://www.cachemania.com
I don’t know why but large organizations whether it’s Garmin or Groundspeak tend not to be very responsive to their user base. Maybe they are afraid they can’t handle the volume of feedback that may be generated.
I’ve read many people say they will be loyal to Groundspeak or they invented geocaching. Loyalty is earned through respecting the people that are loyal to you. Groundspeak is not as bad as Facebook on that front but they could do with being a bit more responsive. As for inventing geocaching we should never forget that Groundspeak doesn’t exist without you and me. We hide the caches and go and find them. You might list on gc.com but Groundspeak owns that listing. The random cache that you see at the top right of this page is probably violating Groundspeak’s terms of use. The only data you can republish is the GC code, everything else is Groundspeak’s. That’s the kind of thing that got the opencaching movement going in the first place.
I have no idea how this is going to shake out but it sure will be interesting.
I actually had a long conversation via email with GSP regarding the random cache item. I had it clarified that what I am displaying is fine as long as the origin of the data meets their guidelines. Still though, I agree with your assessment that it would be nice to have the data a bit more open. I personally just don’t want to see the geocaching community as a whole become so fragmented that it ceases to be fun or useful 🙁
Beta version is up and running
http://www.opencaching.com/
Here is the discussion on ACGA Forum
http://forum.atlanticgeocaching.com/index.php?topic=7035.0
Here is the discussion on GC.com forums
http://forums.groundspeak.com/GC/index.php?showtopic=264419&st=0