Findery for iPhone Lets You Leave Virtual Billboards Chronicling Your Adventures

There's a new social app in the iOS App Store today, which is no great surprise. New social apps bloom and die like wild flowers, but this one has some internet heavyweights behind it. Findery is a location-based social tool from Flickr founder Caterina Fake. The app lets users post notes that are tied to a specific geographical location for everyone to see. It's like putting up your own virtual billboards.

The notes in Findery are composed of text and images. Anyone can leave a note at any location with fun little anecdotes, details of a vacation spent someplace, or a recommendation on what to order at a restaurant. The Findery map covers the entire globe, and it appears to already be populated with content from the web version of the service. It makes a lot more sense as an app for obvious reasons.

There are several different ways to see notes in Findery, all accessible from the tabs at the bottom. The Discover section shows you notes on a searchable map. The Activity tab shows recent notes from yourself and those you follow. Then there is Bumping, which is probably the most interesting thing about Findery. Bumping is basically a location alert when you've wandered close to a note. It runs in the background so you don't have to be using Findery to be aware of nearby bits of information.

The app is iOS only for now, but the website has been running for two years already. The upshot of not going to mobile first is that you'll already see a fair amount of content in Findery, even outside of major cities. This effectively sidesteps one of the biggest issues with launching a new social app.

Findery acts as its own self-contained network, but also supports sharing to Facebook and Twitter. If you're interested, Findery is free for iPhone. There's no iPad-optimized version as of yet.