Posted by Charlie Wed, 02 Jan 2008 18:44:00 GMT
Happy New Year everyone. Clearly blogging hasn't been our strongpoint over the last month, but that's because we've been so busy working on MapBuzz. We'll start rolling out this new work over the next two months - so much more to follow!
Posted by Charlie Tue, 06 Nov 2007 03:01:00 GMT
Over the last few months we've spent a lot of time with users seeing what they like and don't like about MapBuzz. One message that came through loud and clear was that it was hard to see what you could do on each page. The problem was that the allowed actions, like editing a map, were too hard see since they were exposed as hyperlinks in the top right of the page.
As a result, we've completely revamped how actions are shown on each page. Here is an example for a map:
The actions are now shown as big buttons, with associated icons. So far early feedback on this change has been very positive - let us know what you think!
Posted by Charlie Wed, 24 Oct 2007 01:46:00 GMT
One of the coolest things about Facebook is its news feeds, which make it easy to keep up with what your friends are doing. So borring a page from Facebook, we've implemented the same thing for MapBuzz:
So now its easy to keep up with your friends and communities.
Posted by Charlie Mon, 22 Oct 2007 02:10:00 GMT
Yesterday afternoon I attended another REI seminar about Ania Savage's book Best Hikes With Dogs: Colorado. This time it was at the Boulder store and roughly twenty people attended. I thought was a pretty good turnout considering it was a beautiful fall day and the Colorado - Kansas football game was happening simultaneously.
As part of the seminar, I gave a brief talk about MapBuzz and showed everyone how they can access each Dog hike online and add their own comments and ideas. People seem quite excited - I can't wait to hear everyone's comments about the hikes!
Posted by Charlie Tue, 25 Sep 2007 22:10:00 GMT
Today I had the pleasure of speaking at the FOSS4G conference in Victoria, British Columbia. FOSS4g is the preeminent spatial open source conference and has grown by leaps and bounds over the last few years.
My talk discussed how to use Atom (the syndication and publishing protocol) for viewing and creating spatial data - which is exactly what we for MapBuzz. As I've previously blogged, I think Atom will become one of the most important Web standards, alongside HTML, HTTP, etc.
I'll write another post fleshing out some of my ideas, but here are the slides (in PowerPoint at the moment) if you are interested.
Posted by Charlie Wed, 19 Sep 2007 21:43:00 GMT
Over the last couple of months we've spent a number of hours with users watching them use MapBuzz. We've learned a ton about what people like and don't like, what they use MapBuzz for and what they'd like to use it for in the future.
Taking what we've learned, we've been busy tweaking the site to make it simpler to understand and easier to use. The first fruits of our labor went live yesterday - with a new map listing page and new viewer page.
We are most excited about the new map listing page. It's now based on a "map of maps" methaphor - similar to how a hiking book has an overview map that shows the locations of all its included hikes.
When you visit the map listing page, it will show you the nearest maps that the community has created near your location. Thus it offers a quick way to see what's going on nearby.
Posted by Charlie Thu, 06 Sep 2007 21:30:00 GMT
Yesterday was the first interoperability day for the Geo Web Rest group. The group is made up of GIS hackers who are trying to apply mainstream web technologies to the web mapping world.
As part of the interoperability day, we updated MapBuzz to support GeoRSS and Atom feeds. GeoRss is a simple way of embedding location information into a blog, while Atom is a standard way of sharing blogs with other people.
Now when you look at a map on MapBuzz you'll see the standard feed icon. For example, look at Mike's Foreign Embassy Map in Washington, DC. You'll see the standard orange feed icon on the right side of the URL line:
MapBuzz also now fully supports the Atom Publishing Protocol, which means that third parties can view, create and edit features via our standards-based API.
Posted by Charlie Thu, 30 Aug 2007 21:43:00 GMT
I imagine that most people realize that search engines use bots, or spiders, to continually crawl across the web looking for new content. But I bet most people don't realize how pervasive bots really are.
Analyzing the MapBuzz web logs, 64 different bots visited our site in the last few week. And here are the top ten:
You can see they come visit quite often.
Posted by Charlie Fri, 27 Jul 2007 22:33:00 GMT
Besides working on new features and bugs, we spend a lot of time tweaking existing pages to make them simpler and easier to use. Of course, the most important page on most sites is the home page. Not only do you have to convey to first time visitors what your site is about, but you also have to make them interested enough to use it.
Feedback from users made it clear that our previous homepage had too much wasted space. We also discovered users liked the map that automatically zoomed to their current location, and liked the featured maps and communities on the bottom. Based on that feedback, we kept the map and made featured maps and communities more visible.
So when you get a chance take a look at tour new home page and let us know what you think!
Posted by Charlie Thu, 26 Jul 2007 22:21:00 GMT
Two things made Google maps popular - its interactivity and its hackability. Users were delighted when they discovered you could simply hold down the mouse button and drag a map around. Today, any map that doesn't support that functionality seems "dead".
However, for power users, navigating around a Google map can quickly get tedious. The main problem is that you can't quickly zoom in or out of an area.
Well, we think we've solved that problem. On MapBuzz, if you hold the shift key down and then drag a map, you see a navigation box appear:
The way this works is by dragging to the:
Obviously this feature is only for power users, but once you discover it you'll see that it is a very fast, powerful way to navigate through a map.
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