The idea is simple and have been done by numerous people before. It is a map based directory for a group of small people. The idea is an extension of the work I did years ago (post link). I built this site waiting for an entire day in the university campus for a (very annoying) friend who kept postponing the meeting. We finally met at the end of the day and by that time I had finished the web app. I had recently learned to use server side coding (using PHP), databases (MySQL) and had figured out that hosting is not rocket science. Coupled with some previous experience with Google maps API and JavaScript. I quickly built this crowd sourced project where everyone enters their Name and City and the map shows all the people, aggregated based on the zoom level. Simple, Clear and nothing fancy.
Once this was posted to the common forums and people started using it. It became clear that I can do more with it. Suggestions kept coming in and after a point all the suggestions amounted to creating a whole new social network. Though I agreed there were loads of things which could have been improved with the app, I felt the usefulness of this map/visualisation was its simplicity and clarity. The things I felt could be improved were
- data collection from users. Though it is simple as it is, I feel it can be improved by utilising availability of location data and connecting to other platforms (fb obviously). Also possible account management for users, edit and delete their own data.
- Search and find people. This was never implemented. It could have been very useful for people to search and find others.
- Some form of possible communication with other users. When you have a map like this and if you are able to find someone in the map, naturally you try to click on the person to see more details and communicate with them (even if it is a link to their email).
Things I specifically don’t want to do
- Build a suite of information on the users and nag them to fill the information up. No body cares about someone’s primary school or their fourth work fax number. This will just make the whole thing a directory created with a aim to increase the amount of information rather than usefulness of the information.
- Build a suite of interactions within the users and app while creating user interface elements for those interactions. This will lead into user being presented with loads of buttons& forms and when these UI elements starts covering the entire screen they will be folded into scores of menus. This just defeats the purpose of the entire thing. If people wanted millions of options to interact with the people they know, they can use Facebook or any social network for that.
- Anything which is not location based or adds value based on location. Since location and mapping is the central theme of this project.
With all these things in consideration, I spent some time sketching out some preliminary ideas shown below,
I’ll explain them in detail in the following post.
P.S: I still think the idea shown in the sketch is too cluttered and needs significant simplification to be anywhere near neat and useful.