About us

In 2007, Platial and Frappr teamed up to create the largest social map service for both people and places!

Platial maps, The People's Guide to Who and What's Nearby, a free resource where hundreds of thousands of people around the world share and discover all kinds of Places. Anyone can map just about anything including their towns, lives, travels, feeds, files, photos, video and stories in one simple interface.

"Frappr! Maps are like a triple mash-up of an online guest book, a hit log and a map -- three services that, combined, create a fun and visually appealing environment that will keep Web site visitors coming back for more."
-- Kun, Frappr! Co-Founder

Platial and Frappr! Maps are free and can be embedded on any Web page, blog or online community that supports flash or javascript embeds, including MySpace, Friendster, Xanga, Typepad, Wordpress, Google, Facebook and Hi5. We are the world's largest social map service. We help turn your ordinary Web pages into interactive, fun and engaging destinations. Frappr! Maps give Web site owners and visitors an easy and unique way to visualize and interact with each other. Visitors can add their name, photo and message directly on a Web page embedded with Frappr! Maps, and the Web site owner gets real-time stats on where visitors are coming from and how often they visit.

  • 46 Million Places
  • Community Maps
  • Local Maps
  • Search
  • 90 Million People
  • My Maps
  • Groups Maps
  • Visitor Maps

Who's Behind all This?

Platial's core team met up all together for the first time on November 7, 2005 at the Jupiter Hotel in Portland, Oregon. A lot of people have participated in this adventure so far and to every one of them we're grateful.

This is our core team:

Di-Ann Eisnor, Co-founder and CEO
Jake Olsen, Co-founder and CTO
Jason Wilson, Co-founder and VP of Product
Chris Goad, Chief Architect
Tracy Rolling, Director of Community and Product
Chris Henderson, Lead Software Engineer
David Nolen, Engineer
Rama Aysola, Business Development Advisor
Matthew Stroh, Web Designer and CSS Developer

You can see more pictures of us on our Flickr Group.

Platial's Origin, by Jason

Platial enables anyone to find, create, and use meaningful maps of Places that matter to them. Our dream is to connect people, neighborhoods, cities, and countries through a citizen-driven common context that goes beyond geopolitical boundaries. We are building Platial because we adore Places.

The specific concept for building an online, shared mapping tool came after Di-Ann and I had moved to Amsterdam in 2004. We encouraged a lot of people to come visit, to stay with us, to hang out. But we had to work, deal with the kids, etc, and couldn't be tour guides all day long.

We made them maps, like everyone does, of the basic neighborhood amenities. If our guests wanted to go do some errands, it's handy to have a map with more than just museums and shopping malls on it. There was the grocery store, the post office, the good bakery and the locals' lunch spot, plus the place to watch the barges come around the canal, the place where the blue heron hangs out on the parked cars and the place not to lock up the bikes. Dutch friends would invariably be telling us, or our house guests, about their great, unknown Places too, jotting crude directions on napkins and travel book pages.

We ended up with a kitchen drawer stuffed full of these notes. It was our collection of Places, plus menus for take out, magazine articles listing kid-friendly museums, schedules of parades, and a few brochures and tour books for attractions that seemed interesting enough. A few maps got lost, loaned out, or recombined. Others got photocopied or emailed or taped to front doors as invitations.

Then we moved back to the United States, and that drawer of Places lost its context, it became useless in Portland. We wanted a way to preserve all that knowledge in a powerful, useful, contextual way.

We started asking my friend Jake about the technology side of building something to address this, and discovered he'd been working on, and thinking through, some of the same issues. Our talks got more and more exciting as we saw the potential for a broad, useful way for people to share contexts and meanings of Places.

So here we are, building a service that we hope can do some of these things (and maybe a whole lot more) for people. If you have any issues, ideas, or bugs to report, please use the feedback form. If you are the Press, you should contact diann [at] platial.com

Looking Forward,
Jason