STARTUP WATCH: Wander

A Wander postcard, illustrated by Edgar Palacios. Find more images in the Wander postcard project at blog.onwander.com

Wander is a photo-based travel and experience-sharing site that I found out about through @FAKEGRIMLOCK, a marauding robot dinosaur who knows a lot about startups and UX. A few months after his post for NYC-based VC Fred Wilson about minimum viable personality, Grimlock tweeted about Wander’s personality on its pre-launch splash page. After that, I signed up, waited a good few months, and finally got invited into the site. Now that it’s up and running more fully, I thought that I’d give you guys a run-down of what it’s like.

The main part of the site is to talk about places or experiences, which then get coupled with an image. The image can be your own, or there is a large collection of really nice shots amassed by the site’s editors, which then get paired with that location and your text about the experience. I suppose that what they’re angling for is to be a platform for a new kind of photoblogging and location discovery, where users can post and talk about great pictures in interesting locations without having to have been there themselves.

As befitting a photography-based site, the design is pretty great. Here’s how a photo looks in the stream:

When you mouse over the image, you get more of the textual information from the post:

In the mouse-over mode, you can also like, comment on or re-post the image, in addition to being able to see how far away you are from the location that the image is representing.

The location is displayed differently on profiles as opposed to in the stream – check out the stylish little map to the right of this image:

I don’t know how much of a market there is for another way to do photoblogs, but where Wander could be valuable is as a way to explore and discover new places. I haven’t found one on their site yet, but if they added a way to view posts on a map so that you could scout out things to visit in an area, then the value proposition could increase greatly. Until then, though, it’s a great study in website design and is a cool, very visual way to find out more about new and interesting places. Sign up at www.onwander.com and take a look for yourself.

My Wander profile can be found here.