LA Times, Widgets and Mobile

Lots to annouces. First we were mentioned in the LA Times! Check it out.

http://travel.latimes.com/articles/la-trw-buzz13may13

Second, we finally made public the Pubwalk widgets. Currently there are only mostly web widgets available. We'll soon be adding desktop widgets for your sidebars.

http://www.pubwalk.com/widgets.php

Lastly, we launched Pubwalk Mobile. We have a WAP site you can access on your phone while on the road:

http://mobile.pubwalk.com

It tells you where the bars are at from your current location - super useful, just used it the other day in the financial district in SF.

We'll be enhancing all our mobile features over the coming weeks, stay tuned.

PC World

Some great news for Pubwalk, we were just featured in PC World as one of the more useful mashups on the web

http://www.pcworld.com/article/id,128248-page,17-c,sites/article.html

Check it out.

Pubwalk widgets are on the way...

UI Improvements

Listened to the feedback - simplified the UI, added the entire country - and just plain made it a lot easier to use! Let me know what you think.

P.S. I'm starting to see more and more pubwalks being created and linked to as a reference from various blogs (ie "This is the plan for tonight guys"). Awesome!

Improved Search

Thanks for all the feedback received - keep it coming (raj at pubwalk dot com). I've greatly improved the search capabilities, you should now be able to search for "city, state" or "bar name, city" as you would expect. Give it a shot. Let me know if you have any feature requests, I'm working with a list to figure out what I want to add next.

Ready to Launch

Ok, so I think I'm finally ready to launch this to the general public. I've added many of the popular bar-hopping cities, I've also added the ability to embed the map into your own blog or site. This makes event planning way easier if you need to share a bar-route w/ some friends or to a group.

It's still a beta. I know there are some bugs around "search" and the way people write or spell different districts - for example, right now a search for the "Upper East Side, NYC" will fail b/c it's expecting "UES, NYC" - I'll be enhancing this part of the system quite a bit over the next month. Check out the about section, I talk about how "search" actually works.

I'm planning to present it tomorrow at the Speed Geeking event at Mashup Camp, let's see what the reception is.

Oh and my biggest current worry is server load, I'm working on DB optimizations and figuring out how to beef my box to handle more load. The DB queries to get bars within a locale w/ all the other meta-data is pretty intense and thus requires some CPU to suport it.

Feedback welcome.

Raj

Getting There...

Since this is my first Pubwalk blog post, some quick background around the motivations. I love bar-hopping, my friends will attest to it - having lived in NYC a few yrs ago (and now SF), Citysearch was pretty much the defacto for finding bar information etc for exploring the different neighborhoods. (Note, now we have Yelp and others that are doing a great job as well...)

One of the issues with Citysearch was that I always found it difficult to plot routes if I wanted to hit a series of bars in a particular district, I'd resort to writing down the names of the bars and cross-streets and sometimes even Mapquest directions; this was definitely not the best approach.

So this created Pubwalk, a project I did for fun to help myself! It was also a good excuse to mess with AJAX (very hyped when I had started) and with Google Maps (only map API available when I started).

Pubwalk merges Citysearch data with Google Maps. You can view different districts, search for bars (all plotted against a map), plan a route, share that route or save it for later. Plus, being a mobile person (see my homepage), you can send the pub directions to your phone. You can also find late-night eating for those really drunken nights.

Two other interesting twists, you can state that you are going to this bar - this becomes pretty interesting, if there are a lot of users, you can see where people are going each night. You can also leave daily notes to post a particular event or activity or to just chat; the notes are refreshed daily.

FYI, I've no plan to integrate my own ratings or permanent comments, Citysearch does that and I link to them - I'm just trying to enhance the bar-hoppers experience.

So the version I released today is SF specific - there is an option for the Bay Area but I don't think my bar information for that area is complete - 90% of them are there but not 100%.

This is a super-beta and I'm seeking feedback / bugs etc. Post feature ideas below, but note that I am holding off on new features until this version stable. Once stable, I will add all the major cities and then I'll get back to adding features.

A designer will be looking at this site soon to spruce it up, but if any of you have any design ideas, feel free to post those as well.

Enjoy, all feedback appreciated.