Posted by Anders
Thu, 15 May 2008 19:47:00 GMT
We've had icons for a while, allowing you to upload images to decorate maps, features, and your account. Due to popular demand, we've now added the ability to add photos images to features and maps.
The maximum pictures size is now 640x640. Unlike the smaller image sizes, this large size isn't cropped to be a square. Thus, nothing will be cut out of the image.
Here is what the "Feature Photos" looks like in the feature viewer:
Next up is a photo browser, that lets you see browse through photos using their larger size.
Posted in Social Mapping, Development, Infrastructure | Tags development, feature, icon, image, photo, picture | no comments
Posted by Doug
Tue, 15 Apr 2008 17:07:00 GMT
[with thanks to Charlie Savage for contributing to this post]
We've had a news feeds on the site for some time now. Unfortunately, as the site has grown, we realized our original design wasn't fast enough, particularly for large communities like the Colorado Mountain Club and NTEN. So it was time for a redesign.
Our news system consists of two concepts - events and notifications. Events happen when a user performs some action on the site, say, creates a map. Notifications are the individual items that make up a news feed. The big difference is that events are generic while notifications are targeted to specific users. To understand the need for this distinction, its easiest to go through an example. When you create a map, the notification in your news feed will be different than the notification your friends see.
Ideally, notifications can be generated on the fly from events, allowing you to have full and accurate information for every situation. But that turns out be slow. Very slow. Since notifications are viewed many times more than they are created, our original implementation was designed for fast retrieval and slow creation. To do that, we created all the notifications at the time of each event and store them into tables for later retrieval.
Of course, this ultimately ended up being a problem. Over time, we started using notifications in ways that we didn't expect. For example, they became a big part of our integration with Facebook and Twitter. We also added new ways of viewing them on the site that the original design didn't envision. Most of all, we didn't plan on having communities with thousands and thousands of users quite as soon as we did. As these problems came up, we fixed the quick and easy things - such as generating notifications in background processes so as to not slow down user requests. But it wasn't enough, and it was time for a major redesign.
Our basic premise remained the same - fast read and slower creation. But we needed to significantly improve notification creation times so that we could generate thousands of them at a time. We did that by storing the original events along with the notifications. That allowed us to move all the notification creation code into SQL, thereby vastly speeding up creation times.
Although it seems, and is, a simple change, it of course rippled throughout the system since notifications are used in so many places. Luckily one of our mantras from the beginning of MapBuzz is as complete test coverage as we can manage. So although it turned out to be more painful change than we thought, we had a good idea at most times of what still needed to be fixed.
And now that we've done it, the notification system is once again fast. It's not perfect, of course (no one can ever really afford perfection), but it's good enough for now.
Posted in Development | no comments
Posted by Randy
Mon, 14 Apr 2008 22:07:00 GMT
One of the greatest challenges I face when covering the Presidential Election for mapbuzz.com is getting the campaigns to talk to me. You will notice that the event information for both Senators Clinton and McCain are more in-depth than those of Senator Obama. This is because, after months of attempting to speak, write, e-mail, and smoke signal the Obama campaign press staff, they've totally ignored me. In less than 24 hours after starting to cover the race the McCain press people started emailing me everything they send to the press. The Clinton press people now send me EVERYTHING as well. But Obama not so much. So if you happen to know the right people at the Obama campaign to talk to, let me know.
Posted in Politics | Tags ’08, 2008, atkinson, Barack, campaign, Clinton, Election, Election, election_08, Hillary, Huckabee, John, McCain, Mike, Obama, presidential, primary, randy, ratkins | no comments
Posted by Charlie
Fri, 11 Apr 2008 06:57:00 GMT
Phew. Beta 2 of MapNotes, our first Facebook application, is finally done. Last week we released the first version to testers, and since then we've been busy fixing various usability issues that our testers have pointed out. If you'd rather hear about all the nitty-gritty technical issues, then head over to my personal blog where I'm running a series of articles about developing for the Facebook platform.
Let's take a look. Here is what MapNotes looked like last week:
An obvious problem is that the map is much too cluttered - the notes cover each other up. A more subtle issue had to do with the ownership links at the top - My Notes, Friend's Notes, Nearby Notes. Splitting your items from your friends' items is fairly standard on Facebook. But it didn't work for us. The main issue was creating a new note when viewing your friend's notes. A user would create note, then pan the map, and the note would disappear! Why? Because the user had asked to see only their friends notes. Not good.
Here's how we solved those two issues:
First, we reduced clutter by only showing one note at a time. The rest of the notes are represented by colored circles on the map. Besides reducing clutter, this approach has another major benefit - its obvious which note is the current note. That important for users that want to add their own comments to a note. Before it was a bit of a mystery which note was active.
Second, we removed the distinction between your notes and your friends notes. Now you see all of them, with your notes having a star in the middle. If you look at the map around Denver, you'll see there is still a clustering issue when zoomed out, but its much better than before.
Although conceptually simple, these two changes took about a week to do. As is often the case, it wasn't the direct work to implement these features that took time. Instead, it was building the underlying infrastructure to support these features that took time. Obviously you'd never be able to tell that from the screenshots, since the notes look exactly the same, don't they? But it required a fairly big rearranging of our code to correctly support all the ways a user can interact with a the notes - mouse overs, clicks, etc.
We still have a few more usability issues to solve, so onto Beta 3!
Posted in Facebook | no comments
Posted by Wilson
Tue, 08 Apr 2008 23:48:00 GMT
This week I'll be posting the restaurants and clubs that I hit on my last trip to L.A. The trip was great! I had some great food while I was there. Cafe Brasil and Apple Pan where two clear stand outs. But be sure not to over-look the L.A. Gun Club, where I had some of the most fun I’ve had in a while. My favorite club was Cinespace, where I saw the Dim Mak record label DJing. Them Jeans from Dim Mak was the headliner and he kept me dancing all night to point where I was dripping sweat when I left the club at closing. I also hit up a bunch of hip clothing and shoe stores and one very surprising art book store, all worth checking out.
Some links to get you started:
L.A. Nightlife L.A. Restaurants L.A. Shopping
Posted in Urban | Tags Angeles, Clothing, Clubs, DJs, Food, Illson773, Los, Nightlife, Restaurants, Shopping | no comments
Posted by Charlie
Wed, 02 Apr 2008 16:19:00 GMT
We're happy to announce the beta release of MapNotes, our first Facebook application. The idea of MapNotes is simple - make it easy to put "PostIt" notes on a map and share them with friends.
We're calling this a beta since there a few usability issues that we want to fix before launching a final version. We'll be blogging about those changes, so you can see what we are up to. And if you're into technology, I'll be blogging about the technical challenges of integrating MapBuzz with Facebook on my personal blog.
Posted in Facebook | no comments
Posted by Charlie
Fri, 28 Mar 2008 18:28:00 GMT
Hmm, obviously we should have blogged about this ahead of time, but yesterday evening we led of the Facebook Developer Garage in Boulder with a demonstration of our upcoming Facebook application called MapNotes. We'll follow up with more information soon, but thanks to Kevin Cawley for organizing and David Cohen for hosting.
Posted in Events | no comments
Posted by Charlie
Tue, 25 Mar 2008 19:34:00 GMT
The MapBuzz website has grown fairly large. One of the downsides of having a large site is that it takes a lot of time to ripple updated user interfaces throughout it. One of the oldest pages was the search results page, which to be blunt, was dreadful. Take a look:
Some obvious problems:
- The color scheme is dreadful
- Most people don't see the filter bar at the top that let's you limit search results to a particular type of thing (maps, features, etc.)
- Results are sorted alphabetically, as opposed to being groupd by type
Taking all those usubility problems into account, here is the new, improved search results:
Things to notice:
- The color scheme is a lot more pleasant
- Most filter bar on the left is a lot more obvious, as is the currently selected filterd
- Results are grouped by type, and them sorted alphabetically
Better isn't it?
Posted in Features | no comments
Posted by Charlie
Mon, 10 Mar 2008 20:52:00 GMT
We are happy to announce that we are working with NTEN to support their 2008 conference in New Orleans. We've created an NTEN community, and started a map that shows where attendees are travelling from. If you're going to the conference, make sure to add yourself to the map. Directions can be found at the NTEN blog.
In the coming days, we'll also add maps of conference events and parties, so stay tuned.
Posted in Conferences | no comments
Posted by Charlie
Sat, 01 Mar 2008 00:08:00 GMT
Taking advantage of the extra leap day this year, we've launched a significant update to the MapBuzz home page. The new home page includes a number of enhancements, including:
- Map of the day
- Feature of the day
- Site news
- What's new
- Updated look-and-feel
- Quick links to specific topic areas, such as Election 2008, nightlife, Denver, etc.
Our goal with all of these changes is to give a better overview of what's going on in the MapBuzz community - easier navigation to topics of interest, what maps and features are popular, what new content has been created, etc. Let us know what you think!
Posted in Releases | no comments
