Your Geocaching.com Christmas Gifts

Firennice over at Caching and Reviewing has given a nice run down of some upcoming changes to the geocaching.com website, including some good screenshots.

The changes are quite significant and introduce a number of elements to enhance the geocaching.com experience. These changes include:

• Stats – A new page on your profile for geocaching.com generated stats. Cachemania has posted about Groundspeak aquiring My Geocaching Profile for this.
• Maps – possibly the best proposed change is the increased functionality of the maps. At present they are clunky and slow but the changes will produce smooth and dynamic mapping that has no 500 cache limit. The screenshot showing the whole USA is very very cool.
• Favourites (or as it will appear on the site – Favorites) – This is another huge addition to the site and a long-awaited and desired change by many cachers. Based on the number of finds you have you will be able to award favourite points to caches you like. This will be extremely useful for figuring out which caches are the best to go for, especially when travelling – no more wasting time on 200ml snaplock containers listed as regular sized caches!
• Premium Members – Many of the changes, for example the favourite points, will only be available to premium members. This is going to be a big attraction to cachers to maintain premium membership and keep access to all this resource.

The changes were planned prior to the introduction of Opencaching.com but they are certainly timely. I believe they will be big draw card for cachers and may be welcomed by some of the disgruntled ones. Groundspeak have added value to the premium membership – a good thing as it had previously seemed like being a premium member was only to get access to pocket queries.

Well done Groundspeak!

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