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Her personal South End

By adamg on Fri, 06/06/2008 - 9:00am

The Missus posts a map showing all her favorite places in her neighborhood.

Hmm, that could be an interesting idea - personal maps of Boston neighborhoods. There's this Google Maps module for Drupal (the software in place here) I've just started playing with at work. Could be cool to try out.

Neighborhoods: 
South End
Topics: 
Dining


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Comments

By Wade Roush on Fri, 06/06/2008 - 9:23am.

"Personal maps of Boston neighborhoods" is exactly what Povo is supposed to be about -- The Missus should check them out. We covered them in Xconomy a while back, see Povo Lets Residents Say What’s Best and Worst About Boston, Block by Block.

Also, the map The Missus shows is very nice, but it would have been easier to make (and would have been more functional) if she'd used My Google Maps.

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By adamg on Fri, 06/06/2008 - 10:23am.

Thanks for reminding me not to reinvent the wheel.

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By MadMax on Fri, 06/06/2008 - 11:32am.

Hmm. The iconic Pleasant cafe isn't even on Roslindale's Povo map. Needs some work apparently.

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By Shane Curcuru on Fri, 06/06/2008 - 12:44pm.

There are so many "restaurant listings" or map-based "what's where" services that I haven't bothered really pushing any one of them, since I'm waiting for the one with the killer app features that actually gains popularity (well, at least popularity with people I'm interested in, I suppose).

The Povo site isn't bad, and it lets unregistered users add content fairly easily (if not completely intuitively). My key question is: who the heck is it? The About and other metadata is woefully slim, at least for a non-logged in user.

Personally, I definitely want to know who's behind a community interest site, since that gives good clues about where them's who run it want to go. I suppose looking up the DNS record points us to Hasty Granbery, which also shows a handful of news articles announcing the site over the past year, but it doesn't give me any extra warm fuzzies about their particular longevity and stability.

Features and maps are pretty good, and there's a modicum of useful Hub content there, which is nice. What do other UH'ers think? Is this the killer local-stuff app, or are there better ones?

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By Max Metral on Mon, 07/28/2008 - 11:05pm.

We're not the killer app yet, but we're trying really hard. Here are some things that I think set us apart:

  1. Creative Commons License - remix, recycle, reuse, get rich, whatever. It's a Wikipedia-compatible license meaning you can use our stuff wherever you'd like for free so long as you give us attribution.
  2. User Created Search Engines - "Where can I park for less than $10 for 2 hours in the South End?" is not only a question Povo can answer, but that "engine" to answer that question is itself a wiki page.
  3. Anyone can edit - as you say, no signups, hangups, road blocks
  4. True Geographic Info - it's not just businesses, it's which parks have water features, which blocks famous people lived on, which neighborhoods have jumped the shark, etc. It's meant to be more encyclopedic than citysearchy/yelpy. We're also working on letting users define their own areas, e.g. new parks, microneighborhoods, etc.

As far as background, I should update the about pages, but my history is I co-founded Firefly in 1995, and PeoplePC in 1999 (where Hasty and I met). We're still a startup, so obviously anything can happen (we've been at this for ~2 years so far really on the tech side rather than the marketing/content side), but with a handful of passionate editors we feel like we can offer a much more powerful local platform than any of the existing ones with "central control" or with a very weak definition of local (i.e. zip or neighborhood instead of block by block), and that Creative Commons gives us a strong position that your contribution is still "yours" as opposed to surrendering to us like a Yelp review.

We're getting ready to rollout a set of syndication tools for easy links, embedded heatmaps and maps, etc. Any thoughts, requests, or demands would be much appreciated. My email is just "my first name" at povo.com

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