Two Poplar Bluff friends launch 'social tagging' networking platform

POPLAR BLUFF, Mo. -- Two self-taught computer gurus from Poplar Bluff say they have developed a way to make cyberspace literally down-to-earth.

The public beta for GroundMap was released on the Web last week, and the site's creators predict it is going to be the next best thing in social networking, sometime after version 1.1 is launched Jan. 15.

"The Internet is located somewhere nobody knows, and we're essentially making it relevant to where people go," said co-founder Matt Boyd, 25. "We're almost making digital media tangible."

The user-driven software was designed to attach information such as videos, photos, documents and links to a searchable data map. While the goal is to become an application programming interface for the Top 100 Web services, according to Boyd, GroundMap integrates with Twitter, YouTube, Facebook, Flickr, Scribd and Google Maps.

"Any form of media can be tagged to a location," said business partner Eric Bieller, 23, who resides in Nashville but met Boyd as a freshman in Poplar Bluff High School.

Boyd called GroundMap's function "social tagging," since the idea is for visitors to create a profile and have discussions in real-time revolving around locations posted. It's a variation of geotagging, or pinning data to physical coordinates on the Web.

"We want it to be filled with cool places and spread 'viral' so people can keep up today with what's happening all over the world," Boyd said. "It'll be interesting to see how people use GroundMap creatively."

Among more than 100 submissions so far, Matt Bedell, marketing and property manager of The Landing in Van Buren, Mo., entered his family's vacation resort on the site after attending a public demonstration last month.

He has plans to upload documents from his computer hard drive, like the hotel cancellation policy rate sheet and a menu for the restaurant.

"It almost becomes your company website," Boyd said.

Upon temporarily moving to Nashville, Tenn., two years ago, Boyd said, there were plenty of choices of places to go in the city but no way of learning all the history through a single source. He envisioned a computer application that allows people to share what is taking place on the ground, and he immediately registered the domain www.groundmap.com.

With a background in Web design but some shortcomings when it comes to programming, Boyd knew he needed the collaboration of Bieller, who was reluctant at first.

Even though neither went to college for formal computer training, they both recently quit their day jobs and traveled to Silicon Valley, Calif., to talk with potential investors in GroundMap, according to Boyd, who did not elaborate.

Bieller said he intends for the social media platform to outlast him, as GPS technology becomes more compatible with mobile devices, and he is prepared to deal with imitators.

"Our competition is all kind of dancing around the idea of integrating everything, but, in my opinion, it hasn't been done, or else the people that have attempted it haven't done it correctly," he said.