A modern version of X marks the spot

Found two similar sites this morning that are pretty interesting, but I’m not sure they quite hit the mark dead on yet. I found out about them through the Mobilgu newsletter.

The first is Rrove, a social pushpin site that essentially allows you to bookmark and share map locations. Amongst the things being commonly shared are museums, bars, eateries and of course, locations with free wifi! However, the service won’t allow you to add locations from your mobile phone, just from your desktop through a bookmarklet. MobileGlu will let you retrieve your saved locations on the fly, but without a way to add them away from the computer I think the service is only halfway there.

The second service that Mobileglu added support for is called Flagr. The concept is pretty darn similar, but you can add locations via sms text message and even attach photos. It’s pretty slick and seems to work smoothly. Once again, Mobileglu allows you to access your locations on the fly, which is nice, but support native to Flagr would be even better.

Both sites use Google for their maps, which is plenty robust for the aplication. In fact, many people have noted that the one thing Google really needs is a way to save your pushpins. These services provide a means to doing that.

What I’d really like to see is a service that will allow you to geocode your bookmarks either with a GPS unit or based on your cell phone tower and tag them that way. We’re so close to being at that point, that it just feels clunky to have to text in a full address in order to bookmark where you are. I’m looking for the software that will let me just click ’save’ and type in a name on my mobile phone, and it takes care of the rest. And I don’t think we’re very far away from that.

Neat stuff!