We recently told you about the Flickr App garden and gave a list of five interesting apps we found using this new section of the site.
One app we didn’t find – and one that brilliantly appropriates the Flickr API in a delightful, infectious user experience – is Noticings. Part game, part geotagging app, part photoblog, Noticings asks users to upload geotagged photos of interesting artifacts to Flickr. Users tag the photos “noticings;” those photos are then imported, analyzed, and scored, with extra points being awarded for those who post every day in a given week, who post photos of lost objects, or who post the first pic from a certain neighborhood. It is, as the site states, “a game of noticing the world around you.”
“Many of us are moving so fast through the urban landscape we don’t take in the things around us,” the site reads.
“Noticings is a game you play by going a bit slower and having a look around you. It doesn’t require you change your behavior significantly or interrupt your routine. You just take photographs of things that you think are interesting or things you see. You’ll get points for just noticing things, and you might get bonuses for interesting coincidences.”
We find the concept charming, a less boozy version of Foursquare, and a more friendly-competitive version of Flickr or Twitpic.
So, with all the other photo-sharing services out there, why choose Flickr to build a game around? It’s a question of scale, according to the site. “We know other photo-sharing services are available, but we’re on Flickr, so are our friends, and it really does have the best location API for the sort of thing we want to do.”
At the moment, the game seems to have a small user base and a largely international one – which means this game is wide open for early-adopting Yankees to go Team America all over the place! Also, anything that gets geeks outside gets our vote. What do our readers think? Let us know in the comments, and be sure to include a link to your Noticings profile if you’re playing already.
