Archive for March, 2008

Stickymap in CollegeMogul.com

Monday, March 31st, 2008

Today we’ve been written up in the blog collegemogul.com. College Mogul “is a weblog and online resource for college entrepreneurship. [They] cover and assist in the emergence, progress and impact of new and existing collegiate entrepreneurial activity.”

Stickymap was once a college project at Yale.

You can check out the blog post in the link below. They do a very good job of explaining the site succinctly, and they’ve publicized our goal of getting 10,000 installs of the facebook application.
http://collegemogul.com/2008/03/30/stickymap-shoots-for-10000-facebook-users/

We have also been mentioned in John Johnson’s live blog, with some more ideas for using our software:
http://johnjohnson3135.spaces.live.com/blog/cns!3B205349770D59A8!184.entry

Announcing the Stickymap Facebook Application

Saturday, March 29th, 2008

Dan and I are proud to announce the Stickymap Facebook application.  Now you can embed the Stickymap widget on your Facebook page and have it display Stickymap postings in your neighborhood.

If you are a member of Facebook, you can install the app by clicking “edit” next to “Applications” on the left hand side of your profile.  Then, click “Browse More Applications”.  Search “Stickymap”, and click “Add Application”.

We invite your feedback on the Facebook Application, and on the widget itself.  Please stay tuned for more on this exciting development.

Max

Widget Algorithm for Displaying Locations

Monday, March 24th, 2008

I’m going to describe here the algorithm we use in the widget to determine which locations to display. We are considering using this algorithm for the main site and we want our readers to comment on that and suggest improvements. It’s fairly simple.

First, we set a limit of 60 markers. If there are less than 60 markers in the span of view, all of them get displayed. If there are more than 60 markers, then we use our statistics to determine which are more important. Right now, we use “last viewed”. So markers that have been viewed recently go on the top of the list, and markers that haven’t been viewed for a long time go on the bottom of the list. Every time you view a marker, it goes to the top of the list.

I realize that this may not be the top choice statistic to use, but for right now, it’s the cheapest in terms of computing resources and development time. We can switch measures fairly easily, but we’re going to monitor how this one works out first.

Another aspect of this design: suppose you looking are on the neighborhood level. The neighborhood markers get displayed first. Then then street level markers. Therefore, if there are more than 60 neighborhood markers, no street levels will get displayed. If there are 40 neighborhood markers, all of those will get displayed, and the top 20 street level markers will show up. Likewise, city markers take precendence over both.

Play around with our widget (http://blog.stickymap.com/?p=87) and tell us what you think either by leaving a comment, or emailing us at admin@stickymap.com.

Max

Widget Update

Monday, March 17th, 2008

I know this blog has been less active, but there’s been a lot of work going on in the background, and in a little while we’ll have some announcements for you.

In order to prepare our widget for primetime, we’ve needed to make some usability improvements.  Today, we once again tweaked the algorithm for determining which markers get displayed.  Some of our users have expressed dislike for the “importance” level, so now the display algorithm on the widget is completely independent of importance.

I’d like our users to play around with the widget (http://blog.stickymap.com/?p=87) and look closely at which markers get display as you move around, zoom in, and zoom out.  Do you like this new system?  Is there something you would change?  What do you think about dropping the importance level?

Keep in mind that even though we’ve dropped importance level for the widget, we still have it on our main site.  If we like what we see on the widget, we will consider switching the main site to that system as well.

I’ll be more specific as to what algorithm we’re using in a future post.

Max