Do You Yonder?

Probably not.  You're likely thinking, "dude, knock it off with that jibber-jabber..."

If you've noticed in the last few posts, I've been playing around with Instagram quite a bit.  I've been a member for quite some time, but never really got "into" it, as most of the people I follow on Instagram I also follow on Facebook (or to a lesser extent, Twitter), and I end up seeing the same exact pictures twice.

During some downtime at night during my recent vacation I was playing around in the Google Play app store and happened upon Yonder, an Instagram-like app that's targeted at the outdoors crowd.

"Yonder is a community of explorers and wanderers, of climbers and bikers, of skiers and hikers, sharing their love for the outdoors every day."

So why Yonder...especially if I already Instagram?  Honestly, I'm still pretty new at it, so I don't have a definitive answer for you...but I'll list some clear Pros & Cons that I've noticed after about 48 hours of use.

Pros:

• Outdoor Focused - Pictures are of outdoor pursuits only...no other noise...including ads
• Not A Lot of Crossover - The people I'm connecting to on Yonder are clearly different than my other social networks
• Categorization - When you upload a picture, you can categorize it into one of 22 categories - Biking, Hiking, Camping, Paddlesports, Outdoor Photography, Fishing, etc... Hashtags work for collating too, but are not necessary
• Social Sharing - If so inclined, you can also share on Facebook, Twitter, Email, or Message
• Google Maps Integration - You can tag your posts with your location.  While not always the best thing to do for fishing, for those that enjoy other outdoor activities, this can be great

Cons:

• Not a Large Community of Users - Google Play quotes "1,000+ Downloads" for Yonder, whereas it quotes "1,000,000,000+ Downloads" for Instagram
• Social Sharing - A "pro" above, it's worth nothing that the in-app sharing is not as robust as Instagram, can't share to IG, Flickr, Tumblr, Facebook Pages, etc...
• A Little Buggy - The navigation needs a little work.  I'm using Android, it's not always intuitive on how to get around, especially to go back after clicking into something
• Who Needs Another Social Network? - Self explanatory

In any event, I like it enough to keep it on my phone for the time being and give it a longer-term trial.  If you want to give it a try, you can check out the Yonder website, and then download either for iPhone or Android accordingly.  If you do, check me out once you get there under troutrageous1.

DISCLAIMER:
This post is simply the result of me being a tech-dork, one that likes to try new things on for size.  Yonder in no way solicited me to write this post.  If they did, they'd have to send me free stuff before I'd write anything, at the very least a coupon for free fro-yo.  Because nothing hits the spot better after hiking, fishing, climbing, or whatever than fro-yo.  Mmmmmm....