Lars Pind

internet software, coaching, and entrepreneurship

Lars Pind - internet software, coaching, and entrepreneurship
Check out Coach TV, my video blog on happiness and personal development for geeks.
← OBH offers high-resolution images of their products Was this the reason I reinstalled? →

Public work places: The feature list

November 11, 2005 · See comments

It sounds like we have ourselves a team for the Public work places site. Here’s a minimal feature list to get us off the ground:

  • Places have: Name, address, neighborhood, city. Wifi info. Ambience, food, coffee, what’s good, what’s bad. Comments, ratings, photos/moblog, tags. Anything else?
  • Places can be created, searched, browsed, and updated. Who can update? Anyone? Wiki-style? Who oversees it?

Some things that would be fun to do but can wait till we’re airborne:

  • Show who’s there, or who’s frequently there, from plazes.
  • Say who my friends are, and see the places they like which I haven’t been to yet.
  • Same with friend-of-friend—useful when traveling.
  • Pick up reviews posted on people’s blogs and tagged with technorati tags.

What am I missing?

How about a name? Who wants to play with Nameboy? places2work.com is available, should we just grab that?

blog comments powered by Disqus

Comments ↓

  • 1 Jarkko Laine // Nov 11, 2005 at 11:11 AM

    One thing I learned from the _Building of Basecamp_ workshop is: "Don't get hung up on domain names". So let's just grab something, we can always change it later before the launch. That said, wenttowork.com and workercafe.com are free, too. If (when) we are going to build some kind of social aspect to the service, we need to get people to login. The question is, do you need to be logged in to be able to add/edit information? It's not absolutely necessary even for the social aspect to be able to see who has added and what (just that people mark a place as "their own"). So it's imho mostly a trade-off between the entry barrier and lack of control. Does the site turn into a spamming site if we allow anonymous entries and don't have big enough community to self-moderate? I agree with most of your features. Maybe photos/moblog could be saved for a second iteration, though. In addition to plazes integration, some kind of map service integration would be killer, too. Too bad Google (or any other) Maps doesn't really cover Europe, yet. But that's also something for later, probably. Maybe we could collect the coordinates of a place already from the beginning, though, either by letting people fill them in or by fetching them from the address. I don't know if there's any web services for that. Should we set up a Basecamp project for this, so we could keep the threads in one place?

  • 2 Thomas Madsen-Mygdal // Nov 11, 2005 at 11:21 AM

    I definately see this as an .org domain for some reason. In terms of photos you can easily just add tag rss based feeds from 23, flickr, etc.

  • 3 Lars Pind // Nov 11, 2005 at 11:30 AM

    On login, I think with the kind of audience we're attracting, I'd just require login. We can just leave people's cookies forever, like Plazes seems to do, perhaps except for admins. Link to the place's main page is misssing from my list. of course. Also, we might have links to reviews, photos, and other things, that are hosted on other sites. On moderation, maybe we can get away with having a feed of changes, with a link for admins to reject a change and kick that person off the system. Mapping is important, there's gotta be a way. Mapquest does have global address data, though I'm not sure how reliable it is (I once used it to find a hotel in Amsterdam, and it turned out that the spot it had marked on the map wasn't the hotel at all, but the Dam, which is like the main square, and we ended up driving this big Volvo 240 right onto the Dam, which is a pedestrian-only area! Oops!). !http://www.blinman.com/volvo_240_s.jpg!

  • 4 Lars Pind // Nov 11, 2005 at 11:40 AM

    On the basecamp thing, I'd like to keep the project completely open as long as possible. I think photos are important, but we should just agree on a tag for the place, and let people upload them to 23, Fickr, whatever, and we grab them from there. What do tags for that purpose look like? "baresso_norrebrogade_copenhagen"? Should we have the name of our site in the tag? I'm thinking no, because it could be used on other sites that want photos of that place, and there's no reason to make it proprietary. Should we let people type in the tags used for photos of the place? That way you can add photos that others have uploaded.

  • 5 Jarkko Laine // Nov 11, 2005 at 11:45 AM

    Maporama "seems to work":http://www.maporama.com/share/map.asp?COUNTRYCODE=FI&_XgoGCAddress=Juvankatu+36&Zip=33710&State=&_XgoGCTownName=Tampere&SEARCH_ADDRESS=submit pretty well, giving also the coordinates in the lower left hand side. However, what's important is the API. You can play around quite a lot with Google maps, show maps on your own pages, add spots in there, etc (see e.g. "http://www.gmap-pedometer.com/":http://www.gmap-pedometer.com/). I can see quite a lot of possibilities to exploit that in our case. Say, show all more-than-four-stars-in-average hotspots in this area, showing bubbles with info on hover (see e.g. how parking houses work in "search.ch":http://map.search.ch/).

  • 6 Jarkko Laine // Nov 11, 2005 at 11:56 AM

    “baresso_norrebrogade_copenhagen� Ok, how does "name_address_city_state_country" sound, with with the two latter being optional. Address could also use the streetnumber (we can use both with and without when we fetch the feeds), for longer streets.

  • 7 pollas // Nov 11, 2005 at 12:50 PM

    If we just make the tag name stand out (encouraging people to use them) we could get some added benefits from Technorati etc. In case of tag-trouble, can people overrule them somehow?

  • 8 Lars Pind // Nov 11, 2005 at 01:32 PM

    What are you thinking when you say "tag trouble"? A tag picking up irrelevant photos? Overrule by eliminating specific photos?

  • 9 Jarkko Laine // Nov 11, 2005 at 02:21 PM

    I thought about the searching of places and esp. for larger cities it would be cool if you could search fro places near you (a specific address). So I did a bit of Googling and whipped up a "simple script":http://rafb.net/paste/results/qRdjQ923.html that calculates distances between two locations. Once we get the address-to-coordinates conversion going, it'll be easy to find e.g. "cafées less than a km from my hotel". The "place":http://www.movable-type.co.uk/scripts/LatLong.html where I got the original JS script even has a "Google Maps popup":http://www.movable-type.co.uk/scripts/LatLongMap.html?lat1=61.463&long1=23.882&lat2=61.497&long2=23.757 showing the distance.

  • 10 Lars Pind // Nov 11, 2005 at 02:46 PM

    Very cool, Jarkko!