Is Garmin taking on Groundspeak?

This article was originally published on Cache Up NB. It has been mirrored here for archive purposes only.

Within the time period that I have been geocaching, it always seemed to me that geocaching.com and Garmin seemed to have a pretty good relationship. I always saw advertisements for Garmin devices on the site, and it always felt as if there was always a bit of a favor towards the Garmin products on geocaching.com. In fact, the Wherigo project from Groundspeak was launched on the Garmin devices and no other portable GPS unit. It seemed the two were quite good friends. However, it appears that time seems to have changed this.

A couple of months ago I noticed that when I updated the firmware on my Garmin Oregon GPS, the icon for geocaching changed from the Groundspeak geocaching logo to a generic icon. I also began to see less and less Garmin on the website. I didn’t give it much thought. Then today I saw this tweet about where geocaching might be heading. Further reading found that reviews of Garmin GPS units are not visible from the main GPS review page but can be found after digging a bit. There’s also the fact that Garmin has been a bit absent from major GSP sponsored events.

Many of you may not be aware that there has been a growing movement to build a geocaching community/site outside of the Groundspeak base. In fact, if you look hard enough, you will find that there are multiple listing services for geocaching including Terracaching, and something else: Opencaching.

Opencaching seems to have been somewhat of a bigger success in other countries. Although there is no specific one for Canada, there are listing sites for the UK, Europe, Germany, and the United States. They provide many of the same features we are used to seeing on geocaching.com, but provide it in a different interface with different restrictions.

What does this have to do with Garmin vs Groundspeak? Well in reading this article, it seems that Garmin now owns the “www.opencaching.com” domain. It begs to ask the question, is Garmin preparing to launch their own geocaching site in competition with Groundspeak? If they are, what are their intentions and how will this affect geocaching as a whole. Are they trying to take Groundspeak down or is this merely a means of creating a bit of competition for the longtime listing service?

Competitive listing services have existed for awhile but they have never really been able to take off in the way that geocaching.com has. The biggest reason has always been that the data located on gc’s servers is not very portable. There’s never been an easy way for you to take the information you have there and copy it somewhere else. Because of that, other listing services have typically been silo’ed and stand on their own. This has ultimately been there undoing. Most cachers don’t want to have to worry about searching for geocaches on multiple sites. They like the idea of all of their finds, hides, trackables, souvenirs, bookmarks, and caches they want to find are all in one spot. If this gets split across multiple sites, imagine the difficulty in trying to track what you have actually found and what you want to search for. Imagine trying to list a cache and having to list it on two sites instead of just one. If you track your finds and do stats, do you include finds from both sites as part of your overall stats, or do you maintain two completely different sets of stats? Indeed you can see how immediately this can become an issue.

However, the flip side to it is that competition is actually good for the market. If Groundspeak actually had another company that was going toe to toe with them, it would force them to take the necessary steps to keep up. I would love to see what another company’s perspective on geocaching would be and how they would promote and change the sport. We’ve been seeing the sport of geocaching through the eyes of a single company for a long time. It would be nice to see how others would take what GSP did so well, and expand or change it up some.

What’s your take? Would you participate in a new geocaching listing service, or would you stick to what we know already?