photo credit: Tony the Misfit

TechCrunch ran an interesting post-mortem article yesterday by the founder of Meetro, a location-aware instant messaging platform, that recently closed its doors.

Meetro’s idea was to let users download an application onto their wifi-enabled mobile phones that would then allow them to find other Meetro users nearby to chat with.

Paul Bragiel, the founder, cited the following reasons for the start-up’s demise:

1. The location problem: the service only became interesting if there were other users nearby. Critical mass gained in one geography didn’t help in other geographies.
2. The realtime problem: the service would only connect users who happened to be online at the same time. Multiplied by the location problem, this severely reduced the chances of finding other Meetro users nearby.
3. The download problem: the service required an app to be downloaded and installed on a user’s mobile phone. Most people were not interested in doing that.

It’s good to see that StreetSize and Localmouth each only suffer from one of these three problems :-)

Yes, it was time for another round of CSS fun and some delving into istockphoto. I’ve been a bit freer with the colours with this version which I think makes the site look a bit more inviting. I’ve also added some graphical buttons to make the site look a bit more professional and hopefully encourage visitors to sign up and add content. I shall be monitoring the site through Google Analytics to see if the changes have any noticeable impact on visitor behaviour. Fingers crossed!

OK, I’m a bit late with this post, but for completeness, here are the short-list and winners of the Localmouth Best Local Limericks Awards 2007:

• 50 Top Limericks
• Winning Limericks

Enjoy!

Fancy a bit of fun? Here’s your chance…

In a blaze of publicity (well, sort of), the localmouth Best Local Limerick Awards 2007 were launched last week.

Localmouth was feeling a bit empty. To help counter that problem I’ve hooked up a number of information feeds from other websites. Localmouth now pulls in listings for local news, events, property, jobs and personal ads. I’ve also added a Google map of the local area.

Here’s how the new local homepage looks.

Listier is not the only new creation here at mulogy headquarters. localmouth is a new site I’ve set up over the last week which provides a local community homepage for every village, town and suburb in the UK. The residents of each place can use it to share local information such as details of local clubs and things to do in the area. I’m trying to make it as user-friendly as possible so that as many local people as possible are able to contribute information.

It’s been a few weeks since my last post, so there’s a fair bit to catch up on. I’ll start with what’s been going on with VillageRatings.

I spent a while grappling with adding a large database of UK placenames and locations to VillageRatings. This turned out to be quite involved, mainly because the dataset I used needed a lot of cleaning-up and tweaking. Issues included converting between grid references and longitude and latitude and spreadsheet software creaking under the strain of a database with tens of thousands of entries. The biggest challenge, though, was dealing with multiple entries for the same place but with slight variations in spelling. Unfortunately, map locations were not unique to a place, so the removal of the duplicates was not easy to automate. Ultimately it taught me the importance of getting good quality input data if you’re dealing with large datasets.