Yonder
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Daily App: Yonder helps you find treasured outdoor experiences
Finding those great "off the beaten" path places is one of the hardest things about outdoors adventure traveling. Yonder hopes to bridge that gap between guide book and park trail maps with an outdoors-focused social network that allows you to share your great outdoor experiences. Yonder has two main components -- an Instagram-like profile section that allows you to add outdoor "experiences" by snapping a photo, geotagging it and adding a brief comment. You can add details about the experience by selecting a category like hiking, backpacking or climbing as well as adding tags to help others find your experience. Each one of these experiences is added to Yonder for others to see. The other half of Yonder is the exploration part that allows you to view other people's experiences using GPS and a map to help pinpoint nearby shared content. You can look at the shared images and take advantage of the features of the social network by sharing the experience, adding it to a list, favoriting it, navigating to it, commenting on it and more. You also can follow other Yonder users and see where they are exploring. While I love the idea behind the Yonder app, it suffers from the problem that faces most start-up social networks -- engagement. For an app like this to be successful, it needs users viewing the content and users who are willing to share. Yonder is doing its best with ambassadors who are actively promoting and building the network, but the service is relatively new and in the early stages of growth. That being said, there still is useful content on the network, even in my rural area of Maine. And I do think the service is much needed as it is difficult to find the quality outdoor spots, while avoiding those that don't meet your needs. Yonder fits that niche and does so in a beautiful way with a pleasing, easy-to-use UI. Yonder is available for free and you can create an account for free. It is compatible with the iPhone and requires iOS 7.
