Thought this might be an interesting topic to bring up to LoHud.

There are a lot of other "geocaching" competitors out there. You probably have heard of them as NaviCaching, TerraCaching, recently OpenCaching, and more. Although geocaching is clearly the type of "geo-sport" with the most participants, I wondered if anyone else has tried any of these others. I'll probably stay loyal to the original, one and only "geocaching" in which we all use, but a variety of other things are around too.

I came across "Munzee" today which is basically geocaching with QR codes and a smartphone, and it's quickly becoming popular. For those of you who might not know (I didn't for quite a while), QR codes work like bar codes except they are small squares and can show up as information on an iPhone or other mobile device.

Things like GoWalla and foursquare I think are a bit different since you aren't finding any containers, but Munzee is something that seems right in the middle of the pack and can find a lot of followers... voice your opinions here!

I never really gave them much look. I always thought that the 3 offshoots you named were started by people that were annoyed in some way at GC.com. Disgruntled past employees etc... I briefly looked at 1 of them, not sure if it was Open or Terra, but they appeared to have next to nothing listed.

Heck, it's all I can do to grab the ones from GC.com without adding more to the mix

While what you talk about regarding Munzee is kind of an "alternate geo competition games", those sites you talk about in the previous paragraph are really the same exact geocaching game as we play, they are simply alternate listing sites just like what we all use with geocaching.com. For various reasons, none of those sites ever "took off" to the degree of Jeremy Irish's creation, though TerraCaching was probably the most "successful" if you can call it that and I am kind of surprised (not in a good or bad way, just surprised) that OpenCaching has been such a dud as it was created by Garmin.

Which brings up another point. If you go on the Groundspeak forums (though some say such talk is "supressed" there) you'll learn that gc.com has in the past tried to "block" or "limit" rival sites, particularly NaviCaching, which it actually attempted a lawsuit against in the early days of geocaching. It's not known why Garmin started to limit their sponsorship of Groundspeak nor why they tried to "strike out on their own" though.

Radak9 wrote:I never really gave them much look. I always thought that the 3 offshoots you named were started by people that were annoyed in some way at GC.com. Disgruntled past employees etc... I briefly looked at 1 of them, not sure if it was Open or Terra, but they appeared to have next to nothing listed.

Heck, it's all I can do to grab the ones from GC.com without adding more to the mix

You are correct that that's why the 3 offshoots were formed, not past employees (unless you consider Garmin to be an "indirect employee"), more it was cachers who didn't like that Groundspeak rarely involves "user input" into their rules and tends to try to exercise "monopoly power". For example, many people objected when Virtuals, Earthcaches and Locationless were moved to a new game called "Waymarking" 5 years ago and those objections were completely ignored; except for the hypocrisy of Earthcaches immediately coming back because the organization who sponsored them objected to them being taken off GC.com.

But what's made those sites fail are two things:

1) Exactly what you say in your last sentence (in fact, while it still exists, I think that's a lot of why Waymarking failed as well).

2) Not enough users interested (again mainly because of what you say in your last sentence) for there to be many caches to go for, though TerraCaching was starting to build a nice set of them and I'm surprised they completely disappeared. Again, using Garmin's Opencaching, I'm surprised at how few are in the NY metro area, the last time I checked about a month or two ago, the nearest one from southern Westchester was on Long Island!

Admin wrote:I came across "Munzee" today

Munzee was news to me too. Reading their description, it has two main differences to Geocaching: (1) it is more competitive, with a strong emphasis on "scores" and "ranking" and (2) hiding doesn't require a container, just a sticker.
I suspect though that people with a smartphone who are at all willing to get off their lazy butt are already out caching anyway. And Munzee is trivially easy for Groundspeak to counter: They only need to introduce a new cache size called "sticker". Given the many inner city places where not even a nano can be hidden legally or for any sensible duration, a Q-Code sticker (with a human readable travelbug like tracking number for people without a smartphone) would make a lot of sense.
As for trying all the other varieties .. well, I'm anyway in it more for the hiking than for the caches. Currently, Munzee, Opencache, etc don't have anything to offer to me that NYNJTC.org and Geocaching.com can't provide in spades.

One day I thought I should cross post two of my Geocaches on Opencching.us. I don't know why I did it. Only one has been found there. I do not openly cache on that site. Honestly I find the other sites a waste of time. As for Munzee, I don't know. Find a sticker and scan it. Unless it's on a good surface, that sticker isn't staying too long. Also, it's only for iOS & Andriod. I've got a Blackberry. Not my choice, that's what work gives me. I'm on again off again about foursquare. I dont really get it. I don't really need to tell the world where I am because no one cares. I'm also telling everyone I'm not home. Come rob my house. I may start again and not broadcast it to anyone just so I can get to be mayor or a badge, but again who cares? It also kills my battery pretty quickly. As it is my phone doesn't make it a full day without a recharge.

Synopsis: geocaching.com good, everything else not so much. I'm not a fan of letter boxing either, although I've found two. Somehow I like benchmarks better, but they don't really count towards the stats and they are hard to do a search for if one isn't online.

Another example of what might cause a disgruntled cacher to form their own (inevitably failed and misguided) rival site is the recent issue with the APE caches. The last North American APE cache in Washington state got stolen and was archived and the only one left is one in Brazil that is hard enough to get to that many who went there for it hired a local guide (I think it's had only 20 or so finds in 10 years). Many people begged Groundspeak to make an exception and create a similar container to enable people to get the icon, but they said no. Now to be honest, while I like collecting icons too, I normally think this kind of complaint takes "geekdom" to a very silly extreme but there were people who spent money and planned non-refundable trips just to do this cache in coming months. And the Groundspeak forums and the cache listing had more than just of couple of these complaints, I'd say it was at least 100 of them.

Just another example of why, although I do not bother with the "other" sites either, many feel that Groundspeak does not "listen to their customers". That's the last I'll say on this.