Small review - Frappr
For researching, I made this www.frappr.com/helpalot site. I didn’t set it up for Helpalot support, but feel free to join the Helpalot group on Frappr if you like.
So how about this Frappr?
Frapper stands for Friend+Mapper. It’s a social network site that is focused on geographic location. From their site:
“Frappr is an online tool that lets you map out the city where you live, work, vacation, or anything else! You can then share your unique URL with friends and find out where the rest of them live and work in relation to everyone else. It’s great for keeping in touch with friends, families, and groups! You can also share photos, private message them, or leave comments on their MyFrappr homepage.”
Having no logo yet, I don’t really have the right to judge a beta project, but I think they could use some help with the logo, then again, Ebay has the same look for it’s logo (ugly) and it’s doing fine. But let’s not judge a book on it’s cover. It actually is a really nice to see the location of the people in a group/your network. Somehow it makes them more like real persons and less like just a name.
You can place a map of your group on your site. People can see who is listening from where to a podcast for example. It’s a nice feature and leads to more people using Frappr. At least that’s the way I found Frappr.
It makes sense to a map like on Frappr for the Helpalot project. It might be nice to view a map that shows your connected friends and charities. Also in searching it would be great if possible. I visited animalrescuenetworkmap and found out it was a little bit difficult for my browser to keep up with scrolling, while this group has 444 members. So I figure as a search tool to show every charity in the world, that might be asking too much of Google Maps (I’m assuming Frappr is using Google Maps).
Concluding; It looks like a beta product (and it is), with little design, but it has some strong features. It was in my plans to use some sort of map for searching, but using Frappr, I found a new reason. A location is not only a search tool, but it helps in building a mental picture of a person and his/her context. It’s a feature that can help make a social network feel a little bit more social.