Where does TT fit in location based photo-blogging or social journalism?

That’s a question Luke and I have been asking for the past 3 months since we launched the closed beta version of TerraTacks (or terradax).   We imagined that a ‘geo-tagging photo platform’ for visual news aggregation would make a breakout innovative platform for social journalism.   I didn’t anticipate how fast capturing and sharing a photo real-time with lat/long tags would emerge as a standard feature applicable to so many apps.  A commodity.   Communities are forming around topical niches and some make their data open for others to scrape (twitter).   Do we offer something compelling and different?  We have some ideas to test but our initial attention to the technology probably lasted longer than it should have.

I apply the analogy of ‘cut & paste’ to ‘geo-tagging photos’ to remind me that we are  not creating a better way to geo-tag photos (no one really tries to improve the technology of cut&paste).  We want to leverage the ease of geo-tagging photos with the proliferation of new devices (iPhone/Android) to serve a specific real problem in news sourcing and distribution.   We never hung our hat completely on mapping real-time photos but we may have been infatuated with the feature and assumed that would be impressive enough to launch a business.   Because we have a broader story to tell, we’ve made converts but we haven’t had the opportunity to get beyond Act One (take a picture and share it on a map … sign up now).

Just to review some of similar apps I’ve dissected on my iPhone:

• FourSquare (my fav though no photo)
• Twitter (plug-in, extensions that allow photo +location)
• Gowalla
• Brightkite
• Loopt
• Rotzy
• Shareitlive
• iTagIt
• EarthScape
• Respotter
• Graffiti
• more and more and more…

Our snail-pace in development has highlighted the obvious reason to iterate quickly: (1) discover the garbage, misassumptions, wrong turns, ego, fantasies and any other real and imagined road blocks.  (2) throw them out so you can focus on what really matters.  Move forward.  Rinse and Repeat.

For TerraTacks

, that probably leads to addressing the gap between social and traditional journalism.