Turkey’s Turkcell launched a new service called Gezenzi (roughly translates as “share traces of your life”), a location-based micro-blogging platform that allows users to exchange information about places they encounter in their daily lives and travels.
Here’s how Gezenzi works:
On a Gezenzi map, users share location information by keying in text, comments and even multi-media content (including images and – shortly – audio and video files). This information could be about restaurants, travel, beaches, the weather, sports, recommendations, etc, in any particular place in the world. Users can micro-blog information via SMS/MMS, mobile phones or the Web and can track the latest movements and comments of other Gezenzi subscribers. Uniquely, blog entries on Gezenzi will appear based on specific locations rather than on when they were posted.
Gezenzi membership is free and micro-blogging via SMS or MMS will be free of charge until August 2010. It [membership] can be activated via the Gezenzi website.
Finally, in addition to Turkey, the company will roll out Gezenzi to users in English through some Turkcell subsidiaries such as life:) in Ukraine.
At the end of the news item, I wonder why Turkcell opted for its own solution rather than adopting some of the existing platforms like Foursquare and Gowalla. Controlling the end user experience could be a reason, but at the end users want to have one or two services for all their needs and in that sense I don’t see much point of putting resources in developing Gezenzi. Maybe I’m wrong, though…