First Take: Rrove

While in San Francisco last week, I met with David Quiec, who gave me the rundown on his startup Web 2.0 company, called Rrove.

Rrove (pronounced “rove”) is a mashup leveraging the various map solutions, like Google’s. Using a bookmarklet — once you’ve created an account — you can save locations found on Google, Yahoo, Mapquest, and MSN, and then post ratings, comments, and tags on those saved locations. Then they can be managed and shared with others all in one place. This solves the problem of trying to remember which service you used for some location, and of course, makes it social, since you can look through the comments of those in your network (‘community’ at Rrrove), to see what’s a good choice for lunch in the Fillmore district, or a hotel in Soho.

Here’s a screenshow showing a specific location’s reviews by two users. Note the ‘find nearby places’:

The tags thrown on locations can lead to a simple approach to finding what you’re after, although I think they need to support set operations (union of all locations tagged “sushi”, “san francisco” and rated 4 or higher by someone I know, for example) or users will be swamped with too many hits.

Creating a community seems straightforward: you add users to your network. But in fact, the obvious hook — making users’ names linked to a profile that includes an ‘add to community’ button — is absent. This has to get fixed. They do make it easy to delete people, thank god.

Currently, no mashup with Flickr or Plazes, but that seems an obvious direction: pulling pictures from geotagged pictures in these services, for example.

All in all, a cool geoloco app. I am planning to use it for a few weeks, at least, and see what updates they put in place. I know that David walked away with a long list of things to consider from our conversation: RSS, blog javascript widgets, and so on. Enough for weeks of work! That will teach him to have a coffee with me.