Once upon a time…

Back in the Facebook and Twitter-free salad days of 2006, tech innovations company Pelago created Whrrl, a ’social discovery’ application that allowed members to track the ‘footstream’ of their real world adventures and upload recommendations and reviews. It foundered, but Pelago’s social media principles of “perfect information, people are media and pervasiveness of location-awareness” (read more here) were sound - and now they’ve listened, learnt and launched Whrrl v2.0.

The revamped Whrrl particularly caught our eye because it’s all about storytelling. At 1000heads, our projects start with building an inspiring, experiential brand narrative for each of our clients so that consumers feel involved and emotionally engaged in influencing the way the brand’s story is evolving, improving and being articulated. Storytelling is one of our most basic human drives as our way of making sense of the world. A source of both information and entertainment, it facilitates social bonding and shared creativity; It’s our original system for spreading personal, cultural and mythic word of mouth.

Whrrl v2.0’s stated aim is to help people share their stories in real time and preserve them as memories and points of connection, with an emphasis on geo-location and mobile. Pelago “believe this currency of stories will inspire people to go places and interact with people they otherwise would not have, and we see that as a fundamental improvement of human life.” It’s a bold claim, but it’s the kind of thing you need to hear on a Monday morning.

Go tell some stories here.

Brought into the world on Monday, March 16th, 2009 and filed under Uncategorized.