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Maybe its the dingy bar on the corner you spent a year of Saturdays huddled in with your friends. Or the hideaway Italian restaurant where you stole away to eat ravioli alone. It might even be a slim quadrangle in your local park where you lay out when the sun was high and hot.
In any case, there's a good chance you have places in your city that hold some special meaning to you. MessageParty will let you record your history, separated by location, using your phone.
What it is: MessageParty is an iPhone app and website that allows users to write short blogs, complete with pictures and video, as long as those vignettes are tied to specific locations.
"We wanted people to be able to leave stories and notes and photos and videos," said founder Amanda Peyton. "I think that people's initial reaction when they think about location based blogging is a reviews application, but we specifically decided to stay away from reviews. We wanted it to skew it towards narrative content and photographs."
How it works: Users first sign up for an account on the site, at which point they can start to blog out to the world using MessageParty's app. Photos and videos, from YouTube and Vimeo, can be added to each post.
Unlike Twitter, you cannot "follow" people. However, you can go to the landing pages for different locations to see all the posts that different people have left in those locations. With GPS, users can also see MessageParty posts in their area. Right now, MessageParty is not available in a private setting, though Peyton says that this could change in the future.
Users can also add comments to posts, "like" them, or share them on Twitter and Facebook.
Why you'd use it: Though the idea of location-based microblogging will inevitably draw comparisons to Twitter, MessageParty allows users to do more than just write longer posts. The focus on location places the narrative emphasis on real geographical spaces, so that in some sense, MessageParty would allow users to create mini-histories for each place that's important to them.
"Everything is arranged by place," said Peyton. "That's the most prominent filter."
The ability to see other people's posts by location is also striking. A recent featured site, the World Trade Center, drew a variety of shared messages, from the poignant to the wryly hilarious.
"At this point people use Twitter more as an announcement platform and less as a journal or a diary," said Peyton. "That's something we wanted to give people: something you can use every day and keep track of all of the places you go."
How to get it: Just visit MessageParty's site or go to the iTunes App Store.
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