Mapstr Is A Nifty Little App To Keep Track Of Your Favorite Places

Meet Mapstr a hybrid map and note taking app so that you can easily bookmark your favorite restaurants, bars and more. It reminds me of the good old Del.icio.us, but this time it’s for places.

There are already many ways to keep track of places. You can create address book entries, add bookmarks into Google Maps or just create a new note on your phone. But these options are all clunky in some way.

It’s cumbersome to create address book entries and it clutters your contacts. And you want to see your favorite restaurants on a map for multiple reasons. You might want to know which one is the closest. You might be looking for a particular restaurant in a specific area of the city because you don’t remember the name.

Google Maps bookmarks are just stars on a map — they don’t tell you much. It’s hard to know if you bookmarked a place because a friend lives there, because you liked this coffee shop or because you want to try it. As far as I know, you can’t add notes to your bookmarks in Google Maps.

And of course, notes are hard to search and make you switch back and forth between your favorite note taking app and Google Maps. Chances are it will be quicker to do a quick Google search rather than scroll through your notes.

Mapstr takes a completely different approach. When you open the app, you are presented with a full screen map. After that, nearly everything happens on this map because the best way to bookmark your favorite places is on a map.

Then, you can tag your places with descriptive keywords (restaurant, sushi, cocktails, etc.) and personal keywords (favorite, to try, etc.). And of course, you can add notes to remember what cocktail to order. The true power behind Mapstr is that the more places you add, the more relevant it becomes. You can filter by keyword and find the perfect place in very little time.

Contrarily to Foursquare or Yelp, Mapstr isn’t a social app. You won’t find any comment by other users, you won’t share your location with others. Using Mapstr feels like annotating a good old paper map — and it’s a good thing.

from TechCrunch http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/cWlBvcJ1cZ8/

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