THE DREAM IN ACTION

Have you heard of Waze? It’s a mobile app that serves the purpose of a Garmin or any other navigation tool except it has the ingredient those other tools are missing — remember the one that I keep telling you will start to integrate in any successful application — social. With Waze you can report traffic, speed traps, construction zones, and basically anything else that’s going on that might affect your drive or the decision of which route to take, Waze even builds it’s map because off social contribution.

Like any social app there is a catch-22 in that the more people play, the more valuable it will become. Waze says safety first because if the GPS in your phone tells the app that you’re driving it will disable your ability to text at all (very cool). Waze has made some changes recently in the way that it compells participation that you should take a look at… read on.

Here’s a few screen shots:

As you can see by the pac man-esque figure in the screen shot, Waze is a game. You earn points for finding new routes, trekking and exploring new roads, reporting issues, or findings along the way. It becomes fun if you’re engaged in it. Like any game if you’re on the outside you’re probably not going to get it or have that much fun, but if you dive in it gets addicting.

Now games are colliding; Foursquare is allowing checkins via Waze (as you can see in the screen shot above). There are even badges for checking in a certain amount of times through Waze. The online world is becoming a game, all interaction is rewarded and more and more we’re seeing those rewards offline, not just stuck on the web.

If you’re using Waze now I’d love to hear what you think of it. What are the best uses, what’s compelling and what’s boring, and are you checking in via Foursquare?

Below: Some of the official announcement about the badge via foursquare and the gaming mechanics in Waze

Waze recently added ‘road goodies’ – small icons worth bonus points – to the map in areas where the waze system has identified map problems. As users drive around to munch these ‘goodies’, the system analyzes the driver’s GPS data to automatically solve the identified problems, improving map quality, and therefore navigation, for all drivers in that area. The holiday version features wintery, new ‘road goodies’ including snowflakes, candy canes and small gift packages, scattered all over the map.

Taking the gaming aspect of waze even further, this version also features an integration with Foursquare, a new location-based geo-gaming app with a lot of buzz. Users of both apps can now ‘check in’ to various locations on Foursquare via the waze client – a feature that’s sure to become very popular – and even earn a waze ‘roadwarrior’ badge.