Rick Turoczy | May 9, 2008 |
Portland-based Platial, one of the original social mapping applications and caretaker of more than 150 million geobits of information, has rolled out a new build of its application that promises to take a critical step forward in social mapping, moving from the ability “to plot points on a map” to the ability to have much deeper and meaningful experiences with locations and the people who love them.
The newest release—dubbed “Flanders,” following the alphabetical NW Portland street structure that governs Platial’s release naming—introduces a number of new features and a whole new look for Platial.
Not the least of which are a ton of new categories for your map items:
Sharing the experience
But the most important part of the release may not be the things that you see. The most important part of the release may be the things that you feel.
Because the latest build of Platial focuses on helping the viewer move from disconnected innocent bystander to participant, by immersing him or her in the rich contextual fabric of the location.
“We’re trying to push a little further,” said Di-Ann Eisnor, Platial CEO. “We’re trying to capture that experience by providing relevant and contextual information.”
And that experience is definitely heightened by Platial’s move into the content space.
I’m happy to see Platial’s flavor of social mapping move beyond the realm of “writing a few notes about this pin on the map” to something that furthers the storytelling that has always been at the very core of the Platial service.
And with the Flanders build, I see them moving into something that truly gives meaning to location: history, context, deep content, and differing views.
It will be exciting to see where this goes.
(Hat tip Marshall Kirkpatrick)
Rick Turoczy | May 8, 2008 |
Bram Pitoyo writes “Personally, BarCamp Portland was one of the best events that I have attended in Portland. The atmosphere was both very collaborative and conductive to ideas. The people, extremely smart. And the most important thing of all was that, to me, it seems that participants were there because they wanted to be there, not because they had to.”
Justin Kistner writes “Most of us probably check on our traffic stats for our blogs. But, how many of us actually know how to drill down on our stats to find the valuable information that could direct our blogging activities? This session is going to explore techniques for mining your traffic stats on Google Analytics, MyBlogLog, Feedburner, and maybe some more.”
Not exactly a “Web startup,” but from the Portland area. And what geek doesn’t want to protect his or her gadgets?
View all my bookmarks on Ma.gnolia
Rick Turoczy | May 8, 2008 |
With TwitterLocal, Portland’s Matt King took a interesting foray into tracking Twitter users based on their geographical location.
But was that enough for Matt? Oh no.
So, he had to go and make it even more compelling by adding a “Leader Board,” that listed the top 30 Twitter cities, based on the number of tweets per capita.
Brilliant!
Still not enough for Matt.
But now he really may have gone too far. Because he just snuck in what could amount to one of the most compelling slicing-and-dicings of the Twitter types I’ve seen.
That’s right folks. The Twitter leader rankings heretofore relegated to the global stage of Tweeterboard have now—thanks to Matt—taken on a decidedly local flavor.
The TwitterLocal Leader Board now provides the leading Twitter users for each city. (Here’s a snapshot of Portland’s leading Twitter users over the last 24 hours, for example.)
As an added bonus, this new view into Twitter locales also provides a flowing tweet stream from local residents.
Our little TwitterLocal is now a big ol’ “Pulse of [your leading Twitter city here],” with insight into who is currently contributing the most to the conversation.
Tweet globally, rank locally.
For more, take a moment to review the TwitterLocal Leader Board and click through to some of the leading locales.
