Social Mapping

Written by Jay Yungerman

There are lots of apps out there that allow you to check-in at a location, allow your friends to like, cheers, high five, or acknowledge in some other way that they like where you are. This is a great utility for the apps that provide the feature but there can also be a benefit to the location, intended or unintended. These apps create a map of sharing which is what it’s all about right?

There is one app that I, and some of my coworkers, used when working in the field, that had unintended benefits. The app was called “Places I’ve Pooped”, yes I know, how crude of me! But it’s something we all do and when you are working outdoors it’s kind of entertaining. The benefit that we derived from the app was having a dropped pin at a job site. This was useful because sometimes it would be months between site visits and people have a tendency to forget directions. So this turned out to be really useful as well as funny because you could see how many pins were at each site.

I only used this site for outdoor locations, but you can see other people’s pins and they are everywhere. It dawned on me that this could be really useful as a toilet locator tool. How many times has it happened that you’re walking around and all of a sudden you need to use a toilet but you don’t know where one is; if you had this app you could be saved…or one of the dozens of actual toilet locator apps.

​The app is available for Android and has several copycats, and it is available on iOS as well. There are toilet finder apps out there but this is a bit more interactive and if you have gross friends like me it’s entertaining and you could even make a game out of it.

Hope you enjoyed the read!