_{Thanks @louis88 for the epic GIF! 😁}

Haveyoubeenhere 2.0 is LIVE

Today is one hell of an exciting day for us as we are officially launching Haveyoubeenhere 2.0, the social media app for travelers. 🥳 In this post I will give an overview of the why, how and what. But in short, think Instagram, but enhanced like crazy for travelers.

If you just want to jump straight in, you can find us on Android and iOS by searching for Haveyoubeenhere or by checking out our website.

We might have something in store for our first users! 😉

Why did we create Haveyoubeenhere?

As an avid traveler myself, the more travels I've been blessed to go on, the harder it is becoming to keep track of all the memories I made on them, let alone share them with others. I'm sure other travelers here have had the experience of endlessly scrolling through photos on your phones gallery, or spending hours sorting all the content in relevant folders on your PC (which more often than not ends up being a mess either way). Haveyoubeenhere aims to solve this for all travelers. As a nice bonus addition, there are tons of directions we can take to improve the experience of travelers and travel services further.

My first attempt to solving this was with the creation of Pinmapple. Every Hiveian can pin their post to the map by inserting a "code" in their posts. Travel content has the chance to be curated by our team too (bonus points if you post from the Haveyoubeenhere community). Up until today, I still pin every travel blog post I write on Pinmapple and when I want to rejoice in some of my old travel memories my map is still one of the first places I look to. It's been one of the longest and most active projects on the Hive blockchain. Currently there are 62.000 blogposts pinned to the map, which speaks for the demand of a service like it. Haveyoubeenhere in essence is a continuation of Pinmapple. After taking in the feedback of Pinmapple users and other travelers, it became clear that if we wanted to expand the Pinmapple experience to all travelers and "level up" the project, we would need to overcome a few hurdles.

Make it faster and easier to create high quality content whilst traveling

Writing high quality blog posts, usually takes a lot of time and effort and is mostly done from a computer. This means most travelers never bother and (among other reasons), prefer platforms like Instagram where they can quickly post a picture. Those who do usually write blogposts do so after their trip has already finished. For me personally, I've realized I haven't written about tons of my travels because of these reasons.

This was one of the key problems we wanted to solve with Haveyoubeenhere. The solution we came up with is waypoints. In essence a waypoint is like a check-in, but based on a picture you took. The way it works is as follows: you select an image from your phone, Haveyoubeenhere looks at the metadata within this image to find the location and timestamp. You can also write about your experience there. Creating a waypoint can be done within seconds. This means that at the end of your trip you can simply select the waypoints you want in your post and share it immediately. Skeptical? Take a look at this post I created from my last weekends getaway!

Add all the places you visited to your map

When using Pinmapple, each Hive post you write can only be pinned on one location. This is mainly to prevent spam. One of the most requested features we've gotten was to have an option to pin a post on multiple locations. Haveyoubeenhere handily solves this with the solution of waypoints mentioned above. As each waypoint has a location, we can provide each user with their own profile map where all his or her waypoints are pinned separately.

Track the route you took

The way Pinmapple works, you can't really map out the route you took on your trips. Again, using waypoints we can solve this issue. Every waypoint has at a minimum an image, location and timestamp. If you provide Haveyoubeenhere with the start and end-date of your trip, it can draw out your entire trip on a map, as a little bonus it can give you some stats like an estimated amount of kilometers you traveled etc. This is not only great for you to look back on your trips, but can also help other travelers who are visiting a country for the first time to find an amazing trip to make!

Make it accessible for all travelers

Almost all of the travelers I've talked to were enamored by the idea of having their own map pinned with all their travel memories. But after realizing they would have to familiarize themselves with an entire new blockchain eco-system in order to use Pinmapple, nearly all of them (unfortunately) dropped off. Whilst a lot of steps have been and are being taken to improve the Hive learning curve, most people are not familiar with blockchain technology at all and the hurdle to learn it has proved too much time and time again.

After reflecting on this problem for a long time, I realized, we have to switch the script. Which for Haveyoubeenhere meant creating a service any traveler can use without the need of jumping into a new complicated blockchain eco-system. Then and only then, after a user is hooked, we can nudge them towards the advantages of the Hive blockchain. What this is in effect does is create an easy way to jump into Haveyoubeenhere and a high incentive to - in time -, learn about "all this blockchain stuff".

Other dapps have solved this issue by creating "guest accounts", but in my opinion this is not the best approach. My two biggest concerns are that a lot of new users will not realize their content is permanently stored on chain and that it usually involves dapps (at least temporarily) storing keys for their users (big yikes in my opinion).

The way we decided to do this, is by making Haveyoubeenhere in essence a centralized service but allow users the option to store their content in a decentralized way using Hive. Whilst this is a lot more work, it opens up the option to let users log in with whatever social provider they are familiar with (e.g.: Facebook, Google, Apple, etc.) and interact with Haveyoubeenhere in a way they are used to.

Whilst this means that most users initially will not log in with a Hive account on Haveyoubeenhere, the ones that start utilizing Hive made a conscious choice to do so and will likely stick around for the long term. It also means that we see it as our duty to make sure our users know about the advantages of utilizing Hive for their content (for which we created separate info screens within Haveyoubeenhere).

Hiveians will also be happy to note that all posts created through the Haveyoubeenhere app and posted to Hive are automatically pinned on Pinmapple and have the potential to be featured in our daily #traveldigest.

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Looking for a more detailed walk through?

Skip to the 58s mark in the video below!