Pin Drop App Launches On US App Store With Smart New Features

Pin Drop – an iPhone app and website which lets you save, organise, and share locations – has now launched on the US app store with new collaborative mapping features and the ability to have multiple profiles. We’ve been using it a lot in London, where it’s been taking off.

It’s also had a privacy overhaul allowing the ability to toggle between making pins and tags public or private, allowing users to send a list to select recipients or share in public. The idea is to a map and build up a library of your favourite locations, whether publicly shared or private.

The new collaborative lists feature creates lists with multiple users to group subjects among common interests, such as “Cool Bars” etc. It can also be used anonymously.

Now Pin Drop users can also create multiple accounts – such as for personal, leisure or business use. It also allows users to attach audio and video files to pins to provide more context around the experiences, tied to specific places.

Founded by Andy Ashburner who previously helped develop Summly, the news summarizing app acquired by Yahoo! in March of 2013, Pin Drop is proving to be particularly popular among outdoor sports enthusiasts like hikers, skaters, and snowboarders in addition to location scouts, architects, and more.

Competitors include Findery, from Flickr cofounder Katerina Fake, which has raised $11m to do almost the same thing.

So far Pin Drop has avoided the Foursquare tag, (there are no points, no badges, no leader boards to game), however, it does do the most useful thing about Foursquare, which is let you drop information in a location and either keep that private to you, or make it publicly available. Perhaps Pinterest for location might suit it better.

Pin Drop also has an API for third party developers.