It's pretty obvious to me that we've done a spectacularly poor job of explaining eBoatCards and its value.
Nothing about ActiveCaptain's data is going to change. Nothing about the reviews will change. If you like using those capabilities, full access to everything will continue for the long term. Our goal is to continue to expand the use of that data onto many different apps, products, and chartplotters, along with the ability to receive reviews and updates to help others. We're now also expanding the sharing of routes (just announced on Wednesday) so you can synchronize your route data between the different apps and products that support the free and open API. The day of GPX export, file movement, and import needs to end. Route movement should be wireless and trivial. Create a route on your Android phone, sync it to your chartplotter, edit it on your iPad while underway, and sync it to everything so the identical route is everywhere. It's nuts that we can't do that now. This API allows for exactly that with 3 announced developers having support for it now (Coastal Explorer, MX Mariner, Aqua Map).
Perhaps it's because we see all the data streaming in every day from around the world that we anticipated a problem about 4 years ago. We know that the average person views only 5 reviews, even if the facility, anchorage, or hazard has 200 of them. We also know that there are some marinas, especially, who attempt to game the system and add questionable reviews or get others to add them. This is not an ActiveCaptain problem - it's just as common on Amazon, TripAdvisor, Yelp, etc.
But we (cruisers) have an incredible advantage that those other review systems don't have. We have a much smaller and well-defined community. While it might be nearly impossible for me to find someone I know who wrote a review about a book on Amazon, it's easy to find someone's review in ActiveCaptain from someone I know. Everyone who runs the ICW knows the hazard comments from Bob423 as an example. The problem is that the information is often too buried to find.
So our vision is to help define each person a little better. Just like your boat card defines you when you hand it to others, your electronic boat card does the same thing. Because it's electronic, it can go much further and share more types of information since it doesn't have to fit on a small paper card. Of course, none of the information needs to be shared at all and all of it can be completely private or not even filled in.
The moment you start sharing your relationships, identification, and affiliations, some magic starts to happen. Now I can see the reviews from Spring Cove Marina (our next destination) written by the people I know first. Instead of wading through a variety of reviews from people who might well have different needs than me, I can see just the reviews from Defever owners. Perhaps I'll also look at the reviews from pet owners because our dogs will certainly need some exercise while there. What starts to happen is that the huge amount of data can become more tailored for my own needs.
But it goes further...
Services and even products fall into this. What radars do Krogen's have onboard and how do they like them? Which brokers were used by people who are members of the trawler group? Heck, how about the anchorages where the Gourmet Cruising group tends to go in the Bahamas since there's likely good sources of groceries there (if not people who have great cocktail parties)?
But that's not even all of it. Another thing an electronic boat card can provide is your current location (or your next routes). Of course, none of that needs to be shared - keep it secret and private. Perhaps only show it to your direct friends and none of your group members. Perhaps share it with marina sponsors of ActiveCaptain. Let's explore some of the magic that happens with that...
With this week's announcement, we'll provide a trivial way to store and share your routes. Add a little calendar support to that and you can define your plans for the next week, month, or season. Make that private in whatever way you'd like, but imagine if marinas could get access to that. All of a sudden, the dynamic switches from you calling them to make reservations at their published prices versus them contacting you to attempt to attract you to their facility since they know you're coming through at a time when they have space. Instead of spending thousands of dollars on advertising with only the hope of attracting some boaters, they can now attract classes of boaters with discounts. The discount is only "paid" when someone actually "buys" their service which is very much unlike normal advertising which costs a lot and then they only "hope" for results. In effect, it allows the marina to pay us boaters with discounts instead of paying for advertising somewhere.
Of course, location sharing can also help to link up people you know or the members of groups you belong to. You've got to wonder how often members of this forum have been anchored within a mile of each other without knowing it. Add a Trawler Forum free group and now you can be alerted when someone from here is nearby (to go meet...or to stay away!).
Notice that none of this is Facebook. None of it is about posting pictures of what you're having for lunch. It's all about defining who you are, optionally, so you can take better advantages of the data and information that is getting massive on our servers. Again, don't take part in any of the identification aspects and you remain with full access to all of the ActiveCaptain data that exists - there's no attempt or desire to end that (why would we?).
There are some other capabilities I built in because it made sense for the user-interface. The day is coming where it would be nice to have multi-media reviews (photos, videos, drone captures, etc) and even link them into the ActiveCaptain reviews on other offline apps. That data linkage capability has been available for 15 months to our licensed developers and all the products have been adding it. Products like Coastal Explorer, PolarView, Navimatics, Aqua Map, and dozens of others have it right now. We need those apps to have the inside API's to support some of these capabilities before they get rolled out within your ability to add the media. But that media sharing is coming to reviews too.
We do realize that much of these concepts haven't been explained well. We just did a multi-week analysis on feedback we asked for a few weeks ago from our users. Before expanding on most of these capabilities above, we will be stepping back, adding much more help and guidance with a new help module being built, and build some animated concept videos to explain more of where this is all going.
I will say too that none of eBoatCards has been a failure. There are 40,000 boats defined there today. The daily traffic just on eBoatCards.com is higher than the traffic on ActiveCaptain in 2012. The merging of the two websites (ActiveCaptain.com and eBoatCards.com) along with the help and concept videos, we think, will add another 100,000 boats to the system. At that point, we think people will wonder how they ever got along without it...
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