Ever wonder what your house looked like 75 years ago? Or if that beach from your childhood photo album still looks the same? Historypin is hoping thousands of users will crowdsource those kinds of answers after its official launch this week.

Historypin is a non-profit website and mobile app aimed at sparking inter-generational conversation and interest in history. The concept is simple: It uses Google Maps to "pin" old photographs to their location.

The pictures are tagged and searchable by their location and the date they were taken. Curious to see what Times Square looked like between 1905 and 1945? By setting the search parameters, you can pull up old pictures, overlaid on top of a present-day Google street views and maps.

Historypin has already partnered with national libraries and museums that house massive stores of historical photographs. This provides a base of content, but the site is meant to be a crowdsourced affair. Anybody can submit a photo to the site, along with comments or stories about the people and places in their shots. That element of collective storytelling is the real goal of Historypin — and one of the reasons why it won the 2011 Webby for Best Charitable Organization/Non-Profit.







The site racked up tens of thousands of pictures during its web-only beta, and registered around 20,000 users. The plan is to further capitalize on the camera phone phenomenon by launching a mobile app that streamlines the submission and search processes. The app even includes an augmented reality tab where users can hold up their phones to see older images of their current location.

"Historypin was born out of us wanting to use the power of historical content ... collective memory, to bring people together across different generations, across cultural divides, in different neighborhoods and within families, and to have that be unleashed through massive participation," said Nick Stanhope, Historypin's CEO.







Historypin will also start including audio and video submissions to capture even more moments, such as the audio from a Jimi Hendrix concert at the Royal Albert Hall in 1969, or a video of a protest in Trafalgar Square, which can be played over current images and street views.

"While you'll have the whole national and international history, it's broader than that," said Martin Luther King III, son of the civil rights leader and CEO of the King Center, who helped launch the project. The site will be able to mark historic events as well as the small, cultural moments that define communities, he said.