(Link to podcast)

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0:00:13.0 Chris Ronan: Hello everybody, this is Inside Geocaching HQ, our podcast about what is happening at HQ in Seattle. I am Chris Ronan, my user name is Rock Chalk, I am one of 80 or so lackeys who work here, and we really appreciate you having to listen to our podcast. This episode features Bryan Roth, who is HQs president and co-founder, and Sean Boots, our director of engineering. We are talking about Waymarking because Waymarking.com recently celebrated its one millionth waymark, which is super cool. I imagine our listeners have a wide range of experience with Waymarking. Some of you may be really into it, others may have only heard bits and pieces about it, whoever you are, I think you will really enjoy this chat. So here we go.

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0:01:11.5 CR: So going back to the beginning, when did the idea for Waymarking originate? Or Who was it or multiple whos was it that originally came up with the idea for it?

0:01:25.2 Sean Boots: I would say one of the very first things that happened to me when I was hired to work at Geocaching was to basically… I was hired as a helping hand to take on some of the coding work that Jeremy was doing. One of the things that was happening at that moment is that we were having some serious troubles with a few geocaching related activities, and so Jeremy was looking for a path to figure out how to fix those problems. And the two things were virtual caches and location less caches. And so the site came about as an idea when we were thinking about how to solve those two problems. Virtual caches were overwhelming reviewers. People were putting really ridiculous things together and there was a bit of a revolt at the time, and they wanted to do something about that. And then location less caches were becoming a problem for the scalability of the website because so many logs were being placed under the caches and location less caches are basically the equivalent of waymark categories. And so they’re basically a theme-like painted mailboxes or something. Somebody would place a geocache that said, “Painted mail boxes.” And then the location less cache would be, everybody would go find a painted mailbox and they would place a log that says, “This is where the painted mailbox is.” And they would show the coordinates and everything.

0:02:52.6 SB: And people would put, in certain categories, they would put thousands of these logs and it was just bogging the website down and people were having a hard time opening up those pages because we weren’t able to scale in the same way that we are today. So also it was just like the system was hierarchically skewed, incorrectly. Technically, those locations less locations needed to be geocaches. And so we needed to create a website that would handle that in a way that would work better. And so the idea of having these Waymarking categories, which were basically location less caches would allow us to build a website that was kind of just like geocaching, only it was for these categorized types of virtual spots. And so we thought that we were solving both solutions because Waymarks are generally just virtual spots, virtual caches, but in the end of the day, there was still a desire from geocachers to have virtuals because you couldn’t just put random virtuals. They had to be very specifically categorized, like the location less was.

0:04:01.6 CR: What were the, I guess, the original hopes or dreams for the site beyond trying to just, as you kinda said, Sean, kind of solving a couple of very specific issues, were there other things that you, Bryan and the others, were hoping would spring out of this site over the course of years?

0:04:24.9 Bryan Roth: I mean, sure. In the early days, when we first looked at the problem of location less caches and came up with the idea of Waymarking, we had this thought that a user-generated point of interest database could encompass not just the normal points of interest, like restaurants and post offices and things like that, but things that were not already catalogued in the world. So swimming holes, and as Sean mentioned, hand-painted themed mailboxes and ginormous everyday objects. I think in the early days, there was a category for Pennsylvania historical markers. And if you went to the State of Pennsylvania at the time, they didn’t have a list or a resource available to show you where all of them were. But here we had the community going out and documenting the locations within the category. So Waymarking became the dataset for these really unique subsets of data that were being documented by the community. And so we said, “Isn’t it interesting that having a large enough group of people around the world, we could really document all different types of locations that may not receive the attention that traditional locations would receive?”

0:05:41.6 BR: And so we were excited about the project. We thought it would be a cool idea, and we really didn’t know what people were gonna do with it. We just knew that we sort of, as Sean was saying, we flip the hierarchy from geocaching, for location less to be more appropriate for location less. So that instead of on geocaching saying, “Hey, here’s a type of place.” And have people log it with the locations of those places, now on Waymarking it said, “Hey. Here’s a type of place. And then if you have one nearby or if you go out and see one, submit it to this category.” One of the other challenges that was addressed at the time was that when we did location less and even when we did virtuals, the problem that the community volunteer reviewers had was that it was really subjective. What somebody thinks is worthy of being a virtual wasn’t necessarily what everybody thought would be worthy to being a virtual, so there were some that were like, “Come discover this tree in my front yard and count how many branches,” or there was the one where it was like a moldy boot in the forest and people were like, “Oh, it doesn’t make sense to send people out to do this.” But when we go to Waymarking, because there’s all different types of categories, like do we really want people submitting a moldy boot category where people are gonna document moldy boots? That didn’t make a lot of sense.

0:07:13.8 BR: And so the concept that really Jeremy and Elias and maybe Sean, you had a part of this, I can’t claim much credit for, was the concept of having groups maintained by group managers. So people would get together and they would say “Hey, I’m passionate about this type of location,” whether it was McDonald’s restaurants as in the case of Mr. Boots here, or dog friendly restaurants, or public and private golf courses, or independent coffee shops was one of the early ones that I was excited about, and you would come together and you would form a group, you would define the rules for that particular category, and then as a group, you are responsible for maintaining that category and deciding, “Does this individual Waymark submission meet the requirements for being included and published on the site within the category that we are now managing?” And so by having the group management, it really helped to create almost a bar for what would be acceptable, and I think in that way, we’ve ended up with now over a million points of points of interest that are not just moldy boots in the woods or things like that, and in fact there’s I think something north of 1100 categories of locations and some of them are just fantastic. It’s funny, Chris, because we should be interviewing you because you’re the most active Waymarker that we know personally and you could probably speak to a lot of this as well.

0:08:50.6 CR: Well, it’s something that I’ve done a lot more since the pandemic because it was a great thing there and especially in the early days when people really were unsure of what was safe to do and what wasn’t safe to do, it really felt like going out and finding a Waymark was an extremely safe thing to do, and so it’s fun to hear you talking about categories ’cause that personally is what I’ve enjoyed trying to do, is just trying to identify categories where I haven’t found a Waymark, and then trying to find where there is one, and when you were talking about Bryan at Pennsylvania historical markers, and it made me think of… I was listening to a podcast, this was a couple of years ago, and they were talking about Mold-A-Rama machines, and they referenced Waymarking.com as a place to go to [laughter] to find a very good list of the Mold-A-Rama machines in the world which ironically, I still have not gotten one from that category because the places where you could get them have been closed [laughter] for the last year or so due to the pandemic.

0:09:52.5 BR: On that last note, one of the things that also happened when it came to the aspirations for the site is that I think we discovered that technically Geocaching itself is kind of like a Waymarking category, and we actually even that one time had a project to re-factor our code bases such that Geocaching and Waymarking would be on the backend side of things, all one site, and they were gonna all run on the same code base and they would still be separated as sights or whatever because the code technically works like that, because it’s generally the same general concept. We actually had plans to put them together so that Waymarking would actually be a super set and then Geocaching would just be a Waymarking category, but all the other categories were cool enough to warrant being their own sites as well, and so there were some thoughts that that could be something we could do, is just basically hand ownership over of those sites to the people who are running them in the form of those groups, and then they would actually have their own website that could technically be scanned and everything, but that project did not make it to the light of day and probably for the best, to be honest, but it was planned at one point and we actually undertook it for quite some time.

0:11:11.1 CR: Well, that kind of leads into what I was going to ask next, which was about what kind of talk was there? How much talk about would Waymarking be integrated into geocaching.com? Would it be its own icon or something where you would get “credit” for finding Waymarks on… What kind of discussion, if any, was there about that in years past?

0:11:34.0 BR: We definitely had some discussion around it. There were discussions at one point about adding Waymarks to the Geocaching app so that people could go if they wanted to find Waymarks as well, and I think we just felt like it would be too complicated and quite a bit of work to do that type of integration and so ultimately we decided against it, and really what we decided around that time was that Geocaching was growing pretty rapidly and we were a small company with limited resources and we felt like, “Hey, here we have Wherigo which is in a state of development, we’ve got Waymarking which is in a state of development. We really like both of those projects but it feels like the one we should be spending the majority of our time on is Geocaching.” And so we really stepped away from day-to-day development with the exception of some smaller projects and ideas that we had, really, when Sean would have time to do work, he would go in and adjust the code and add a feature or make some correction or something like that, but at one point in the history, and I guess it was probably 2010, 2011-ish, we decided that, “Hey, let’s put our primary focus on improving the Geocaching site and the platform and we’re not gonna turn Waymarking off.” And thankfully we haven’t ’cause I know there’s a lot of people including the three of us that are pretty passionate about it.

0:13:03.8 BR: And so, it’s been something that we’ve always thought was cool and I think it’s just as cool now as it was 10 years ago. I mean, the fact that we hit a million Waymarks, all user-generated points of interest, it’s pretty remarkable. It brings up one funny thing which was, in the very early days, when we were talking about this dataset, we had the opportunity to purchase additional datasets that we can incorporate in. And we made the deliberate decision when we said, “The goal is not to have the biggest dataset of point of interest data, the goal is really to have the biggest user-generated point of interest dataset.” And so when you look at that, all of the Waymarks in the system, those were all created by an individual user or a team, submitted to the site, reviewed by group managers and published because the people in charge of that group felt that it was worthy. And for a cool project like that, I’m delighted that we made that decision so long ago because I think it makes the site even more special.

0:14:15.6 SB: One other thought about putting Waymarks on to geocaching is that I think that there was a time when we actually had regrets having not done that, because we believed at the time that if we had done it, it might have driven a lot more activity to the website because obviously people cared so much about finds and everything. And I think that the fact that we didn’t do that actually drove us into the decision of making geocache challenges be a step that we did show on the website, which actually drove a lot of the activity with that side. But then, ironically, that became something that we regretted also because we wanted to get [chuckle] rid of it. But by having it be a fine count it made it so difficult to pull that away because we actually had to take something significant away from our users. So hindsight says the decision that we regretted initially was actually the right decision, most likely, in terms of how it affected the game, but we didn’t know that at the time, but yeah, it’s very funny how it all just kinda comes back.

0:15:21.7 BR: It’s probably a good opportunity to remind our listeners that, one, there’s a sign on the wall of Jeremy’s old office that says, “Let’s make better mistakes tomorrow.” And it’s something that has been sort of a part of our culture for many, many years. And what’s interesting is sometimes what feels like a mistake isn’t exactly a mistake, and it takes a couple of years or more than that to get the right perspective to understand that maybe that original decision wasn’t so wrong after all. And it feels like maybe that’s one of these cases.

0:15:56.0 CR: Yeah, I was gonna say, you bring up geocache challenges, there’s a lot of listeners that wouldn’t know what those are. They might know what challenge caches are, but geocache challenges were a very different thing, and maybe we’ll do a special episode someday about it. [laughter]

0:16:11.8 BR: Or maybe we won’t waste anybody’s time.

0:16:15.0 CR: Or maybe we won’t make the nightmares come back for the key players on that deal. But kinda going back to the beginning, Sean, what was the development process like for Waymarking.com? Who else was involved? Was it mainly you or were there other folks who were also involved with it there in the early days?

0:16:34.6 SB: In the beginning it was an idea that we had. When I was hired, there were only, I think, seven people in the office, and actually, Bryan was, I think in, one day a week at that time. But Jeremy’s process was like, he was the sole coder for Geocaching at that time, and I became the sole coder for Waymarking. And so we had Coco, who’s the mother of signal, she was heavily involved with all the pixel art aspect of Waymarking. That was sort of a decision that we all thought that pixel art was really cool and that would be a really good way to go with that. And so she kinda had a passion for putting cool pixel art type things together for the site. Jeremy’s brother, Nate was working for the company at the time, and so he sort of played a bit of a product role where he and I passed a lot of ideas back and forth with one another. And just on a day-to-day basis, we would just decide together on the thing that we would try and we kinda just threw it in, and so it was really a bit haphazard and it was sort of like whatever we could think of that would turn this thing into a cool thing, was what we tried and we just threw it in there.

0:17:42.3 SB: And yeah, and Jeremy and Bryan would have ideas and they would say, “Hey, we should try this.” And I’d be like, “Alright, give me a month. [chuckle] I’ll throw it all together.” And so things like the groups, which I think is probably the most complicated code on that website, all the functionality with the automated reviewing system that’s in that code, Nate and I were pretty meticulous about how to put that together, like we spent a lot of time figuring out what would be necessary and how that could be automated and how we would make that work. That was probably more of how it worked, it was like throwing ideas back and forth, and then I would just go in and code it up and it would take however long it took. It was very, just whenever you get it done, ship it kind of thing, and do your best to make it not boggy or whatever, which is as best as you can do with being a single person with no QA.

0:18:36.7 CR: We may have already said, but what year was this? When this was all starting up?

0:18:42.9 SB: I was hired in 2004, and I think the first released version of Waymarking went out, I think, in August of 2005, I think is when it first started, if I’m not mistaken. Yeah, anybody who was a location less cache owner was given the opportunity to turn that cache into a Waymarking category and automatically be accepted as a category owner. This is before the groups was in place. And in order to do that, we would have them retire or archive that location less cache. And so that was sort of the key and then that was how we kicked it off, basically.

0:19:26.9 CR: And for people who haven’t been to the site or maybe haven’t looked, there are over a thousand categories today, which I don’t know how many there were when you guys started, Sean would you remember?

0:19:38.0 SB: Well, in terms of the location, like less cache, I think it was probably like, I don’t know, 50-70, I think maybe. It might have even been as many as 100. But yeah. And those were all categories that didn’t have to go through the peer review process that we have today. So that’s another system that we developed. It was a system that people could vote on the new categories, and it was a whole complicated system to get new categories up and running, but yeah, I think it was something like 75, I think, if I’m not mistaken.

0:20:09.8 CR: Do you have certain features, each of you that you feel like are, I don’t know, Sean, that you’re most proud of from a development standpoint, or Bryan, something that you just really think is really cool, are there certain features that each of you particularly enjoy about Waymarking.com?

0:20:26.0 BR: Yes, absolutely. Go ahead. Sean, talk about scavenger hunts. That’s a good one.

[laughter]

0:20:31.1 SB: Bryan knows my answer already. [laughter] I mean, for me, scavenger hunt is sort of an idea that, it’s an example of how when you build a feature, it doesn’t necessarily guarantee that people are gonna use the feature, there has to be some form of a press to get people to understand what it even is, but I think, for me, the concept of scavenger hunts is whenever I do Waymark, I use that because for me, it’s much more fun, it’s basically you generate a scavenger hunt based on some criteria, and what a scavenger hunt is, it’s just a list of X number of Waymarks that you want to go find, it puts them into a bit of a grid, so you have sort of like a bingo grid, maybe let’s say nine Waymarks that you’re gonna go find, and it doesn’t show you the pictures of them on the scavenger hunt page, it actually shows you just squares with coordinates, and so you can kind of go to these geocaching, or Waymarks, sort of like going geocaching, you go to the point, it takes you to the location, and then when you find it you can log it and then unlocks that square, and so basically it’s a little bit like Adventures, except that it’s with a category, Waymarks that are categorized on the site.

0:21:52.4 SB: So for me, I took a couple of trips to Europe and I did a scavenger hunt in Salzburg, Austria, and I did one in Munich, and it was like the most unusual and cool way to experience a city that you don’t know, because it’s taking you to places like fire departments, and you don’t actually know when you set one of these up what kind of generated places that are gonna be added to it. So this is just this randomized series of weird locations that you might just go discover in a city, and so when you pick something like Munich, all of a sudden you’re just going to these crazy things and for some reason for me, seeing the photos of Waymarks in context is like really enjoyable for me, I really love to go to the Waymark, having an idea of what I’m gonna go see, but then I actually get there in the real world and it’s like, “Oh, that’s how that puzzle piece fits into the real world.” and it’s just, there’s something delightful for me about that. So anyways, that’s my feature.

0:23:00.2 CR: Bryan?

0:23:00.7 BR: Well, for me, I had a dream one night, honestly, and I remember it, I don’t remember all that vividly, but I remember coming in and we had all of these pixel art representations for each one of the categories, and I woke up and I was thinking like, “Wouldn’t it be cool to have a grid view of all the available categories that you could get, and when you get one, it would fill in the pixel art for that category?” And I remember I was like, “Oh, it’s a grid, we could just call it a grid or whatever,” and I came into the office and I had some conversations, and I will say, and Sean can back me up on this, it was not a well-received idea, [chuckle] it really wasn’t, except that Sean liked it. And me and him talked about it, and he’s like, “Hey, you know, I think I can build this.” And he put it together and we put it on the site, and I know people used it, people were really enjoying it, and people were playing games with it, like fill a row or fill a column for bingo. And one of the really cool things that I loved, still love about it is that when you go look at some of the more prolific Waymarkers, like yourself, Chris, but like Bruce as for example, you can really get a sense of just how active they were or they are with Waymarking because you can see all of the different pixel arts that are filled in on their grid.

0:24:31.5 BR: And it was just something that turned out to be cool, and it was a fun way to visualize everybody’s individual progress, either in terms of submitting Waymarks or finding Waymarks, or just to go look at another player and see how they’ve chosen to participate. It was just really cool. It’s probably my favorite feature, ’cause it felt like I contributed something to the overall platform, but I know people still like it.

0:25:00.7 SB: My feature is really great because literally, it is extremely difficult to, as Chris probably can attest, to actually get a quote bingo, which is what people really, really liked, they liked the idea of filling out an entire row of categories, which is either you post or find a Waymark of that category and then it counts, and then you have that whole row filled out and it’s very difficult to do that, I don’t even know what is the hundreds of rows, I guess, or close to 100 rows maybe, but it’s not easy to do, and there are a couple of people who have endeavored to block out the entire grid, and I don’t know that that’s ever actually been achieved or not, but I’m pretty sure there’s a few people that came very close. Bruce is somebody that comes to mind, we should also mention that Bruce is one of the more important figures of the history of Waymarking, he is a significant contributor, unfortunately he passed a few years ago. He was a really great guy, but very, very thorough, and he had a deeply cared about the quality of the Waymarks that he put into the system. He basically waymarked the entire State of Missouri, that place is probably the most waymarked place in the known world or whatever.

0:26:26.9 SB: And each one of those Waymarks was something that he put meticulous amounts of effort and care into, and so it’s a really would… Today, if I were telling you where to go to find a high quality Waymarking experience, I’d tell you to go to Missouri. He actually acted as an administrator for the website for a while, he was like the leader of the community, he was a really great person.

0:26:50.1 BR: And the things that’s fun to note for when we just hit one million Waymarks about a month or so ago, we had the one million waymark geo coin that was produced by Shop Geocaching, and as a way just to honor the contributions of BruceS, and wayfrog and a couple other folks, we took their pixel art icons and they are on the coin itself, so we felt like it was just a nice way to say thank you and honor those folks for their contributions, and really as Sean is saying, the Waymarking site would not be what it is today without the efforts of those people and quite a few more.

0:27:31.7 CR: Yeah, I would echo that. I’ve found a number of Bruce’s Waymarks over time and they are very thorough and very well done, kinda going back, Sean, you were talking about rows, there are 57 rows. I did go and look that up.

0:27:46.4 SB: Oh. [laughter]

0:27:49.3 CR: And then the columns are lettered from A-T. I’m not sure why, [chuckle] if you even remember why you stopped at T, but it’s A-T, and now it’s up to 56 full rows, and then there are currently four categories in the 57th row. So there you go. [laughter]

0:28:08.7 SB: Like the idea with the letters was that we had a pretty good idea that it was gonna go beyond, yeah, I don’t know, it feels like we could have gone to double A, double B, or double C, or whatever, but I don’t know, like what that crazy brain of mine was thinking at the time, I can’t recall. Yes, you’re saying across the board, it’s A-T, yeah. [chuckle]

0:28:27.1 BR: Maybe we went to T because it’s a 20 across. Is that right? Is T the 20th? You know, just T makes the math easy. I think that’s right. I don’t know. I don’t wanna count the letters or sing the ABC, but I think that’s why.

0:28:41.9 SB: I know that’s why we stopped at it, it was because I think we decided on 20 being the… But why we used letters to do it, that I do not remember that answer.

0:28:50.5 CR: Well, it may have been a little confusing to have numbers for the rows and then numbers for the columns too. I don’t know. Me personally, I think it’s nice to be able to say, “Okay, I’m just gonna pick a random one here, as I’m looking at the outdoor altars is 41-A.” So it’s easier to say that than if it would have been, “41-1.” You know?

0:29:09.7 SB: Right. I think that probably makes the most sense. And yeah, going like T-57, or 57-T makes more sense than saying like, 20-TT or BB, so maybe that was the thought.

0:29:27.5 BR: It’s funny to think about Outdoor altars as just an example of a category, like there’s no book that you can buy that’s gonna document all the outdoor altars, I mean, Who even knows what that mean? The only people who really know are the category managers who have said, “In order to be an outdoor altar in this category, here’s what you need to show up with.” How many outdoor altars do we have?

0:29:51.3 CR: There are 412 outdoor altars right now.

0:29:54.8 BR: Okay, 412?

0:29:56.4 CR: Yeah.

0:29:57.2 BR: I bet that’s more outdoor altars than any other dataset has documented as a category, that’s just kind of cool.

0:30:04.6 CR: Oh, yeah. Totally.

0:30:06.8 SB: We used to have a list, and we don’t any more, but we used to have a list of, ’cause we kind of keep track of categories that when you do a Google search for that category, we would be the first site that would pop up for that, which would be sort of like a trophy for us, like we achieved the goal of being the primary source of outdoor altars or whatever, and so that happened on quite a few different categories, there were several is like, “If you wanna find these out, you’ll get there through Waymarking.”

0:30:40.6 BR: It was like fishing holes at one point was one of them, but Waymarking was the number one response on Google professionals, I don’t think that’s the case anymore. But that was years ago.

0:30:53.6 SB: There’s another feature that is, I think one of my favorite features, and I don’t know, to be honest, I haven’t used it for so long that it might not work anymore, to be honest, but it’s called the Waymarking footprint. If you go to your profile and you had… This is how it used to work. And after this, I’m gonna have to download Google Earth and see if it still works or not, but Google Earth, if you would download Google Earth and then download what’s considered to be your Waymarking footprint, it actually would plot all of the Waymarks that you found, it would put them on the map and draw like some kind of a shape around them, and what it would do is it would basically show you the territory that you had, so to speak, conquered or whatever with your Waymarks. It would show you. And then it would also show you based on how many you had found, it would color that shape a certain way, so if you were to look at somebody like Bruce who had seen Waymarks all over the world, or had posted all over the world, and had covered in a vast amount of territory, his whole world would just be completely covered with a shape, whereas mine is much more focused on this area, Seattle, and then I had a couple of other dotted locations where I found things, so my shape would be more like United States-centered or whatever.

0:32:16.7 SB: And then his would be like this bright red color because he found so many, but mine would only be maybe kind of a darker green color or something. Anyhow, it’s sort of like a way to sort… You would see people who never left their city and only had Waymarks, but they had thousands in their city, and so they would have these small shapes, but they were bright red from having… Yeah. So anyways, I always thought that was super cool. And the reason I thought it was so cool is because of the math that I had to do to make it work, [chuckle] I had to find a special algorithm to make it work, and I spent weeks trying to figure out how to make it work, and I was very proud of myself. So anyways.

0:32:54.4 CR: The website started around 2005, what was the “heyday” of Waymarking? What years was it at its most popular?

0:33:04.1 SB: I think it was pretty much from… Like it took a while to get it ramped up, I think. Like we generated some interest immediately, but it kinda kept moving up. By about 2008, it was probably getting to that point, and I think that its best year was 2011, and then it started to go. It coincides almost entirely with when we stopped throwing resources at the site, you know, like that’s when people were seeing that the bugs weren’t being fixed as quickly, and new features weren’t being added, and so it had a bit of a decline at that point. So it went down, 2018 was probably its low point and now… Well, we should talk about Waymarkly, I don’t know, I’m assuming people know what Cachly is, but Cachly is a Geocaching partner app, and creator of that app also created a Waymarking app, which I think has driven a lot of interest back to the site again. And now we’re all of a sudden seeing kind of a renaissance or whatever, whatever, like, I don’t know, rebirth, I guess, because there’s quite a few users that all of a sudden started taking to this again, and honestly, this Waymarkly app is really the missing piece of why, of what has always been missing from Waymarking.

0:34:24.4 SB: Waymarking is super cool, but it’s hard to use because it’s a website, and so we’re all using our phones, it’s not that fun to put logs in a web code on a phone, it’s just not that easy, and it’s not really that designed, it’s not web-responsive, it doesn’t nicely fit on a phone, so you kinda have to mess with it. The app, however, is really well done and is mostly for visiting Waymarks, it makes it a really lovely experience. Chris, you’ve done it probably more than anybody here, but it’s given a reason, or it’s made it doable to actually play this game.

0:35:05.2 CR: Yeah, it’s really a game changer. As I said before, I got more into Waymarking again, when the pandemic began, and at that time it was before Waymarkly came out, and it was a huge pain to create a list of Waymarks that I might wanna do. I would download them always, each one as a GPX file and then load them into my garment or different things like that, so certainly Nick’s project, Nick of Cachly, this Waymarkly app for iOS. If you haven’t checked it out, you should, ironically, Sean, you’re not an iPhone user. So you have not been able to use the app.

[laughter]

0:35:46.6 SB: Yeah, trust me it’s so frustrating. It makes me so sad. No, it’s giving me incentive to make my own android version. But yeah, I don’t know if that’s ever happened or not, but it’s something I’ve thought about, but yeah, it’d be really nice if we had an Android app for it.

0:36:04.1 CR: So, I think you guys may be touched on it briefly, but we talked about the site’s heyday then, could we talk a little bit about why the active development did not continue? I think you just kind of briefly alluded to wanting to focus on Geocaching, and that’s kind of where the resources for a small company had to go at that time.

0:36:24.1 BR: And that’s really it in a nutshell. We were a small company and we didn’t have a lot of resources. Like, I think a number of people out there know that we’re not a funded company, so we haven’t raised venture capital or private equity, and we really fund all of our operations through Premium memberships primarily, and then merchandise sales from Shop Geocaching and some programs like travel about promotions and Geo tours and some of the smaller commercial adventure lab tests that we’re doing. And so we just didn’t have a lot of resources and we were forced to choose at one point because Geocaching was growing so rapidly and required a lot of attention, and we made a conscious decision to say, again, “We’re not gonna turn them off, but let’s put them aside, so that we can focus on what we think is most important now.” And I know all of us, myself are included, are just delighted at the fact that now there’s a Waymarkly app out there for people to play and hopefully more people get acquainted with the website and the tool set and continue to contribute, and let’s see if we can get to two million Waymarks at some point.

0:37:37.2 CR: Are there any future plans for the site? Sean, I know you kinda get in there or be so often when you have an opportunity that you’re very busy with your job at HQ, with Geocaching-related stuff, but whenever I talk to you, you seem to have different things percolating in your mind that you would like to get to, if you have a few free minutes here.

0:38:01.5 SB: Yeah, it definitely continues to be a maintenance mindset with Waymarking, I think we always want it to work, we always want it functional. There’s been some thoughts about using it as a bit of a test bed for trying some experimental type ideas, I’ve talked with our product manager, a director of our product about potentially playing with Waymarking as some form of, we wanna try some idea first there, see How does it get received? I don’t have any really good thoughts about what ideas to talk about yet, but we’ve discussed the possibility of doing something to that effect. Obviously I have an interest in keeping the site up-to-date with latest technology, under the covers at least, so that it continues to run and that we don’t have things deprecating under us and just having it break automatic, and also maintaining it, being a secure site so that we’re not putting our users at any kind of risk, that’s probably the piece that’s most like happening right now is just trying to just make sure that it’s in a secure place. But yeah, I think we’ve built an API for it, but I think that’s probably the biggest next step kind of a thing that’s happened with it, which is why Cachly was able to build an App is that he was able to tap into the API.

0:39:25.5 SB: And so this is a thing that’s available, and I guess if the right person comes along interested in building an Android version or something, that might be something we would be open to. So getting people who are interested in looking into that it’s not nearly so well documented as our geocaching API, and you know, there’d be some challenges with keeping that supported in the way that we do with our geocaching stuff. Adding more functionality to that API is probably gonna be the next more likely… If there’s anything new that is added, that would probably be how we would go about it. You know, connecting that to the website too, so that the code is happening with Waymarkly, exactly the way it is with the website, and then there’s some things that are happening like that that could happen. Yeah, so keeping it alive, keeping it moving, maybe throw in some experiments in there every once in a while, with the very little spare time I have. I have some interest in doing that for sure, making that API into something a little more robust or whatever would become pretty cool.

0:40:35.0 CR: Well, for both of you guys, just as we close out here, hitting one million Waymarks, that must’ve been pretty exciting for both of you given that you’ve both been here since the very beginning of this thing.

0:40:47.6 BR: Yeah, absolutely. It’s remarkable, really, to consider that here we put this tool set out into the world and enough people adopted it to the point where one million points of interest, it’s a really significant number, especially when you consider the amount of work that needs to be done in order to create the categories, administer the categories, go out and document the locations, acquire the metadata to associate with each location, submitted, have them reviewed, have been published. To know that that’s been done over 1 million times. I always think of numbers as like you go to a stadium, so like the Seahawks will play in front of 70,000 people. Well, that’s more than 10 times fill women filled, and then some, and you’re still not even at a million, and so to know that that’s happened, it’s staggering, I guess when you’re a little kid, I used to measure stuff in gum balls, and Oh, it’s 50 cents? That’s 50 gum balls. And nowadays, it’s like a million, it’s a number that’s really hard to comprehend, but when you go and you start looking through the Waymarks and you realize that a category like outdoor altars can have 400-plus Waymarks in it, it gives you some sense of just how we got to a million and how much of a contribution it’s been from the community and from everybody involved.

0:42:22.9 SB: Yeah. I think that’s the big key too, is that we had a lot of help, starting with Bruce and wayfrog, the two administrators that we’ve had that have mostly taken over administration for this website over the past, probably getting close to 10, maybe more years. Without that I don’t think this would be possible. So that’s a huge, huge important piece of this equation, but I will say that it takes a little bit of personal pride in the fact that this website has been able to be largely functioning on its own in terms of like maintaining groups of reviewers who are actually actively reviewing Waymarks as they come in. There’s a huge number of people who are actually participating in keeping this thing alive. So the passion of this community, even though it’s not a large community, it’s pretty small, but they have a huge amount of passion and they’re actively working to make this thing into what it is and so for us to take credit for it is really wrong, I would say it’s more that we just kept it up, that’s where we get to take credit, I guess, but it’s really all about the people who love the site and who keep using it.

0:43:31.5 CR: And Bryan you’re a Waymarking officer?

0:43:35.2 BR: I am, I am. Since we started it, I think I’m currently an officer in nine categories, but some of the original categories were started by me, so the independent coffee shops is one of them, I think dog friendly hotels and dog friendly restaurants are categories that I’ve been involved with. And a number of others, I’m looking, painted hydrants, I always thought painted hydrants were cool and it’s just fantastic what people have done with fire hydrants, and so documenting those.

0:44:08.9 CR: I think you really approved one that I submitted for a painted hydrants, a couple of years ago.

0:44:14.6 BR: I approved you a dog-friendly restaurant earlier today. They just show up in my email and I’ll go in and I’ll look at the categories, and often times, I’ll try and send a note if it’s a cool picture or say like, Oh, this looks like a lovely coffee shop in Chile, like I’d love to visit there one day. You kinda make a connection with people that are on the other side of this, I don’t know, it’s just another cool aspect of the site, I’ve always enjoyed it, aspire one day to visit some of these independent coffee shops around the world and see how many I can log and maybe get a mocha or something, but we’ll see how it goes. Right now in my limited free time, that’s not exactly as possible as I’d like it to be.

0:44:58.8 SB: Before we go, I have to tell one more story about… Well, it’s kind of a combined two stories, one is that the first category of Waymarking was a McDonald’s restaurants, and I forgot to tell the story when we were talking about the idea for why the site came into play. Before I worked for Groundspeak, I had kind of a thing for McDonald’s, I was like, I ate it way too often, I don’t know, I just have a thing for the branding of it, I just kind of thought it was kind of fun, and I know that there’s a bunch of people that feel the opposite and that’s fine, but anyhow, one of my friends and I had an idea that some day we wanted to go and eat at every McDonald’s in the state of Washington, or at least in the general area, and before this project happened, we actually thought that was a doable, like that was something that was possible, but now I realize that would be very difficult to pull that off. But anyhow, so I started thinking, hey, it would be kinda cool to have pictures of all the Waymark, all the McDonald’s around.

0:46:17.1 SB: And so I just had this personal dream of, and I never even put it together that the site that I was building would be the perfect tool for making this goal happen until we started looking for content as a first round thing. And so McDonald’s became the first category, and ironically, again, that was probably the wrong decision in terms of making this into something that people wanted to do, turning it our very first Waymarking category is a commercial restaurant that is polarizing, and whatnot. I think Waymarking in the early years was branded as corporate McDonald’s, it’s all about McDonald’s. They didn’t understand, people didn’t understand how cool these things really were because we pushed too much that it was also allowing corporate commercial type things as well, and I think that was probably in hindsight a mistake. But anyhow, Waymark Number One is a McDonald’s restaurant that is downtown in Seattle, and Bryan and myself, when we went to celebrate the millionth Waymark decided to go to Waymark one as our celebration, and when we got there, we were shocked to find out that it had been turned into a Chase Bank. [chuckle] And so I had to sadly archive Waymark One on the same basically week that the Waymarking hit its millionth Waymark or whatever. And so we actually had to find a different Waymarking McDonald’s to go to for lunch, but we had a very nice time.

0:47:54.1 BR: And what was funny about that was, we went to this other McDonald’s, and we were like, “Oh, we should make this into a Waymark,” and Sean took pictures and we got everything ready, and then we got back to the office later and figured out that it’s already a Waymark and it was marked by Jeremy.

0:48:16.0 CR: Wow, that’s super cool.

0:48:17.5 BR: Oh yeah.

0:48:18.9 SB: We got to log a Waymark rather than post one, unfortunately.

0:48:22.3 BR: Exactly, exactly.

0:48:24.1 CR: Well, this has been great. I’ve really enjoyed hearing some of the history of this, and I’m sure people will also enjoy hearing it. Guys thanks a lot. I really appreciate your time.

0:48:34.3 BR: Thanks, Chris. Thanks, everybody.

0:48:35.5 SB: Thank you so much. That was great. That was fun.

[music]

0:48:42.1 CR: That was Sean Boots, HQ’s Director of Engineering, and Bryan Roth, our President and co-founder. Go to Waymarking.com and dive right into it, and if you’re an iOS user, download the Waymarkly app and give it a try. You use the same login credentials on Waymarking as your Geocaching account, so it is really easy to check it all out. Hey, if you have an idea for us to cover on the podcast, send an email to Podcast@geocaching.com. I always love to hear from you. For Sean and Bryan, for myself, and all the lackeys at HQ, happy caching and happy Waymarking.