Of growing popularity on Facebook is, curiously enough, a game in which one guesses the location of places on a world map. Traveler IQ presents a small-scale map of the world and then prompts you to click where you think is the right location of the city or other place. There is a timer and one scores points based on speed and accuracy. Players advance to increasingly difficult levels and the game ends when they run out of time.

According to a recent Wall Street Journal article, TravelPod founder Luc Levesque created the game to draw people to his travel Web site TravelPod.
Adonomics, a site that tracks and values Facebook applications, shows that almost 1.7 million people have installed Traveler IQ as an application on their profiles and the game enjoys more than 33,000 daily active users. Adonomics has been tracking the site since June 28.

While it’s great to see the popularity of a geography-based game, Travelr IQ has some annoying quirks. Because of the map scale, pinpointing the exact location of a city is virtually impossible, even when you know exactly where it is on the map. While one gets points based on distance from your guess to the actual location, the scale of the map gets annoying after a few plays. (And it’s not just me that thinks this - there are many Facebook comments on this point as well.)

Also, the location questions recycle frequently, meaning players can learn the correct locations and better their scores (if they can remember the right answers). This skews the leader board to those who replay the game frequently. Scoring should account for the number of times a player has played the game.

Since the developer made Traveler IQ for marketing and it is so popular as is, I doubt he will make improvements. Quirks aside, it’s nice to see so many people, at least those using Facebook, find attraction in a location-themed game. There are other map games on the Internet – a decent sampling from maps.com shows a few including many similar to Traveler IQ, called “Find It” but for regions. Find It games also give you a chance to guess until you are right or skip a question. National Geographic offers GeoSpy amongst a slew of other games on its site. While these games are, in my view, “better” they are not on Facebook.

Even more popular on Facebook than Traveler IQ is Where I’ve Been which lets people post a map on their profiles showing places, well, where they’ve been. With almost five million Facebook installs, according to Adonomics, the application is also available for other social networking sites including MySpace and Bebo. While it’s not a game, per se, it is fun to see and compare where friends have been.

The popularity of Traveler IQ shows that games might be a decent, and perhaps underused, teaching tool for geography, worth more formal exploration by educators and geographers. It also shows that to reach an audience, you have to go where they hang out — online on social networking sites!