earthfaves is a global network for people who love nature, culture, food, fashion, travel, fairtrade and sustainable products. It is also for people who have a passion to explore the world, find great local highlights, and have a good time, both abroad and in their own country. earthfaves people are finding the best, the most authentic, and the most original places no matter where on earth they are.

We believe that in a networked world like ours, excellent service, true beauty, and great products will win over advertising power.

This is why we built earthfaves – to provide a "stage", a collective consciousness for truly great places. Places in nature that deserve to be known because they are simply nice. Businesses that provide outstanding service, great products, and are run by nice, passionate people.

Let’s spread the word and the love for the great little and big places we know. Let’s say "I love this place" and highlight the little gems that too few people know about.

Let’s make sure our friends learn about what we like and why we like it. Let’s also help their friends and everybody else who is interested in finding places of real authenticity and value.

Together, let’s start building a world of favorite places for every one of us. Earth – we love this place.

The "earthfaves" brand stands for:

earthfaves brings together the place recommendations that matter the most – the favorites and insider tips only – by the people who matter most to you: your friends, their friends and local and professional experts you decide to follow. This way, you can easily get thousands of tips for great places around the world and find hidden treasures wherever you are.

earthfaves aggregates favorite places and insider tips loved by real people. It’s a place where users, experts, small (and not-so-small) business owners join forces to highlight the best places to be, to work, to hang out, to enjoy life. Only the best places, the places real people love, will stand out.

We believe that excellent services and beautiful places are more effective than big marketing budgets – if all enthusiasts join in spreading the word, saying “I love this place” about the special places they know. Then the little gems become more and more known, more and more people go there, other companies copy their style – and we get more and more better products. The soft way to change the world for the better.

Apart from that, we don't really make use of the friend networks we have built up on Facebook, Google+, etc. With earthfaves, you can not only save great places you visited for recommending them to your buddies, you can also find the best places your friends and even their friends know, in seconds – and if enough businesses join in, you get discounts from your favorite places, no matter how small they are. Sounds good, doesn’t it?

Well, consider these things, and then add it as your earthfave:

1. If this place is a business, I bet the owner would be more than happy if you shared it with your friends on earthfaves – he needs your support to succeed! Remember: even great places had to close down because they did not get enough word-of-mouth!

2. And even if your favorite one gets crowded: the owner might open up a second one - or a competitor improves his services so that the quality increases!

3. If this place is a nice location in nature – ok, nobody wants to see a secluded bay overcrowded, but you also want to find such a place anywhere you go, don’t you? So you need to get tips from others as well.

4. And: there are sooo many more beautiful locations on earth, only if we share them we can find them!

We only allow public sharing. It is just part of our policy to provide the public stage for the best places and businesses worldwide – those who have people that say "I love this place".

We won’t sell your personal profile data, we don’t save your conversations, we don’t even need to know who you are as long as your friends can identify you. earthfaves is there to create a communication platform between people and the businesses they love to help both to have a good time. The business owners will see some stats about you which will help them to judge your importance for their marketing. But if you don’t want them to see these or to contact you, just opt-out. But think about it carefully before you do this: it would really help the business if you didn’t and ideally, the business owner also says thank you more than once.

If you are not interested in receiving specials/discounts from businesses you love or businesses your friends love, untick "send me specials from businesses I love" and/or "send me specials from businesses my friends love" in your user profile. If any other user spams you, block him and / or let us know. We are going to get him!

If you find bugs, please send us an e-mail with a screenshot and the browser version you are using to .

We had the idea in 2007, we founded the company back then. Until today, we built earthfaves in our spare time. The business so far is only funded by ourselves, friends and family.

Markus had the original idea and conviced Barrett to join in, on a plane from Austin,Texas to Frankfurt on the way back from a common friends’ wedding. In early 2008 we started putting earthfaves into action. Barrett found the name, Markus defined the web site, slogan and business concept, Tim turned the ideas into a conceptual design, Olli developed the brand and cared for three UI re-designs over the years. earthaves is a family thing in a way - Markus and Oliver are brothers and Tim is their cousin. Barrett and Markus met at SAP where they worked together. Tim is partner at www.ergosign.de and Oliver, a successful freelance art director who's won design prizes in New York, Los Angeles and Germany.

But they wouldn’t have had any chance without the development experts: Daniel did most of the development together with Markus T. and several highly talented computer science students from the universities here in our region: Saarbrücken, Metz, Zweibrücken and Trier. Our French developers Dorian, Rémi, Fabrice and Rick, plus Jana, Pascal, Dominik, Yves, Anna and Asis are still today part of our team despite all the time they have to invest in their studies. Thanks as well to our Spanish development interns José, Miguel Angel and Maria and to Oli, Arno and Heiko – you rocked this place – as well as our U.S. contact Michael!

We also had numerous marketing/social sciences/tourism students that supported us in creating a compelling value proposition and helped us to prepare the sales pipeline: Normen, Alejandra, Stefka, Vanessa, Tatjana, Sebahate, Lenaïg, Lena, Lia, Xiaoyan, Markus, Nelli, Teresa, Martin, Benny, Liliana, Weronika – and our Dutch interns from S’Hertogenbosch Pieter and Pascal.

Thanks, without you it would have been even harder to get this done!

"Faving" a place i.e. becoming a "faver" is easy. Sign up, search the map for the place you want to add to your earthfaves. In the result list, click on the "fave it first" or "fave it" button of the right place. Then write one or a few words to let your friends know what you love about the place. Optionally, you can add more information about a place, like address data, e-mail, suggestions for improvement (we try to send them directly to the business owner!) or a general description. You can also upload an image or two.

In case you cannot find the place in our address database, you can simply drag and drop a green "e" in the right spot on the map to fave it. This way, you can also fave any place in nature without a real address, e.g. a beach, a view point or even the park bench.

Once you’ve created an earthfave for a place or added an existing earthfave to your list you’ve become that place’s faver.

If you’re a business owner, and you don’t want to spend a dime, simply fave your business – and promote this page. It has got a unique address you can send to your friends and customers. The more favers you find for your earthfave, the more people recommend it to their friends and friends of friends – the more word-of-mouth from real people it gets.

The most crucial part of earthfaves is inviting your friends from other networks (or real life) to add them as your earthfaves friends. If you make friends on earthfaves, you exchange own favorite places, faves from your friends and from their friends!

Your own earthfaves appear first in your search results, your friends’ favorite places will be ranked second as "friends’ results". Ranked third are "results from friends of friends". This means that you’ll get a multitude of hot and highly trustworthy tips as your friends network grows. So make sure you don’t make friends with everyone ;).

The best is to follow interesting people you don’t know. Search results from these show up in fourth place, under "from users you follow". You might want to follow locals in regions you’re interested in, experts and professionals like tourism offices, magazines, city guides etc to make their high-quality local tips appear in your personal search results. If others like the places you recommend, they may follow you to stay up to date on your latest recommendations.

You can also add others’ earthfaves to your own list, thus becoming a faver of an earthfave someone else created. If other people do this with your earthfaves, your community ranking rises – and you might become "(Wo)Man of the World" one day if you reach 10000 points.

As you add earthfaves, make friends and follow others, your earthfaves network will grow – and so will your universe of favorite places, the best places to know.

Use earthfaves’ networking tools to maintain and expand your network: Invite your Facebook friends to make friends with you and your Twitter followers to follow you on earthfaves.

Use the "Share" buttons to show a great place you know to your friends via e-mail and/or in other social networks.

Or even easier: auto-publish your latest earthfaves on your Twitter and Facebook profiles (to do so, activate "Auto-post to Twitter" and/or "Auto-post to Facebook" in your account settings).
Embed a "follow me on earthfaves" box on your blog, website, or other social networking site to win followers and spread the word about your favorite places.

Embed earthfaves maps and links in your blog posts, newsletters, or other online publications.

You can also use earthfaves to let the owners of your favorite places know what they could improve – just a short hint can make a big difference. When you "fave" a place, you’ll be asked for your ideas on "what could be improved" – if you write something down, the earthfaves team will try to send this feedback directly to the business owner. You can help by adding the e-mail address of the business to the earthfave information. In case the business uses the fee-based earthfaves Promoter.

Relationship Management solution, the owner might even get back to you with a huge thank you - or a Faver Special. Earthfaves encourages the exchange between businesses and the people "who love this place" – we actually want all to team up to create better products and make great products known!

With earthfaves, you’ll have instant access to a huge base of favorite places around the world – all the best places to be, loved by people whose opinion you trust, findable in seconds. You won’t need any other local guide anymore.