Return of the Virtual

There has been a lot of speculation about the return of virtuals, for those interested I quote Jeremy:

In the UserVoice updates I never said that virtuals were coming back in their previous form, but instead something would be available that should capture the interest in virtuals without the baggage (such as the subjective review process).

To me, this is the most exciting project that we've worked on in years, but it will take some time to iterate through the idea and I know we'll get some things wrong, but the framework is solid. We'll be investing a substantial amount of effort with this project moving forward.

Some points:

• It will be on Geocaching.com, not a new web site. It will be a separate section in the beta, but I expect it to be integrated into a joined search at some point.

• Currently they will not go towards your find count, but it might at some point. It won't at the beginning though.
• It will be a visible statistic, so you will see them on the profile, on the logs, etc.
• We'll be hopefully launching with mobile applications to compliment the activity. I expect that the majority of participants will be using smartphones, but we will have components (Pocket Queries, GPX file downloads, etc) for traditional GPS devices.

For the comments that we should involve the community more, we do. We don't have a public discussion about it, instead working with a smaller sampling of geocachers.

You may commence your celebration, complaints, and/or discussions now.

Update on 2011-07-25 22:29 by firennice