Platial News and Neogeography

Announcing "Nearby", Platial's new native app for the iPhone & iPod Touch

For those who have been waiting, and those who had no idea it was coming to this, we are proud to announce our first stab at a Platial client for the iPhone.

The angle we took for this app is a little different than Platial's main role on the web. With Nearby, we challenged ourselves to really keep it simple, and local. We have restricted all the queries to only care about your actual physical location. Hopefully this means a simpler interface, and a more directed experience. We still have many issues to work through, both on the performance and the data sides, but we hope it's stable and fun enough to use on a daily basis as it is. It's never been so easy to capture your life on a map!

The main features that really help it stand out from the crowd are:

• No registration required, even for adding and saving your favorite spots


• Access to the incredible world of hand made Collections from Platial's existing member base


• The optional ability to merge the device with a Platial account, giving you a powerful publishing tool in your pocket

So, if you have the new iPhone operating system (a free update in iTunes) with App Store, install Nearby, give it a spin, and let us know what it still needs.

Bug Fixes In!

Some sorely needed bug fixes got in today related to deleting places, adding images, bulk upload and so much more. This took longer than it should have. We've been all hands on deck with the iPhone app and we're seriously short on resources right now. Everyone who signed up to beta test the iPhone app will receive an invitation tomorrow- thanks so much and Happy Mapping!

Good News For Wordpress Bloggers

We updated Platial yesterday with one nice new feature for Wordpress bloggers. You can now put your existing Platial maps on Wordpress. The Platial mapkit widget has been in the Wordpress gallery for a while now, but until yesterday you could only put a fresh, new, empty map up. Here's how to take one of your existing maps full of your favorite places, and put it on your Wordpress blog:

1. Log on to Platial.com
2. Under your map title on your homepage, or in the map header, click on "embed" or "publish."
3. Choose the Wordpress logo and click next
4. Copy the code into the widget control panel on Wordpress.

We had a lot of people write in to tell us that they found the new markers too gigantic, so we reduced their size by 25%. Let us know how you like the new size. We also made some bug fixes this week. Some images weren't appearing in hovers and in the flash image scroller, but they should reappear. Maps on blogs should also stop showing the whole world instead of the area where your markers are in IE7.

Thanks to everyone who sent us in feedback this week. We love to hear from you!

New! Improved!

Flanders
We are so excited to unveil our newest release. Excited isn't even the word. We are giddy. Those of you who have known us for a long time already know this, but we name each versions of Platial after the alphabet streets of Portland, Oregon, in order. It is with great pride that we introduce to you the new Platial, aka Flanders. 

We Look so Fancy!
Our new sharp looks come from the creative mind of Matthew Stroh, who is going to continue to bring on the shiny as the newest member of the Platial team. We also owe the success of this redesign to our fresh new Lead Engineer Chris Henderson, who has helped us get our act together since coming on board a couple months ago. Everyone on the team has worked really hard on this deploy and deserves to bask in a little ray of glory. Here's an overview of what the new Platial has in store for you.

More Publishing Options
Now you can auto-embed either a flash map or a javascript map onto your favorite blogging sites and we've added more auto-install options because what the world needs now is less cutting and pasting.

More Advanced Features in Your Map Set Up
Block people from commenting on the Places on your map--for those who don't want to know what other people think!

Review places before they appear on your map--a must for those who put their open maps out on Facebook and Myspace!

Map Navigation to the Max

Show Don't Tell
The categories in our new map legends make it easy to see what kinds of places are on the map at a glance. We are slowly working on categorizing all of the Places on Platial. 

Save Your Spot!

Knowledge is Power
Map details put all the information and stats about the map right up front.

New Hovers Give You More

Where Was I?

Where Do I want to go Now?
The recommendations tab will always have good ideas about where to look next.

We're Not Done Yet!
The bulk upload tool is being rewritten and will be back in your add place tray very soon. The slider is also missing from the new design for now. We'll soon make it possible for you to change the categories of the places you added in the past and which our robot might have mis-categorized. Keep your eyes peeled for frequent updates and be sure to write to us so we can make your Platial dreams come true. All our best ideas come from you!

Shout Outs
We had a lot of extra help pulling this together and we want to thank everyone who was a part of this big deploy. Our helpful, inspiring, domineering creative directress who shall go mysteriously nameless was our main inspiration. Platial beta tester club members who helped test this include Stormy7g, Ayogist, Rekha6, Scootdown, and Raju0704. Michelle Rowley, David Knape, and J Chris Anderson pitched in on the technical side. Pauric O'Callaghan finally gets to see some of the flows he helped us work out in action. Bob Kim didn't work on this deploy directly, but way, way back long, long ago he helped working out some of the ideas that we've finally been able to implement here. We also need to give a big thanks to the very understanding Platial families (our spouses and children) who put up with us working some long hours. Thanks for keeping me fed, honey!

Books on Platial

We are getting ready to start working more advertising into Platial to help us pay the bills. We have had Google adsense running for some time now. Because we know that most of our users are big readers, we are experimenting next with Amazon books.

I know that nobody loves advertising, but it is the only way for us to continue to offer our product, as I'm sure everyone understands. Our goal is to integrate advertising that is pertinent, context-driven, and for products or services that are interesting to you. We are working on refining the quality of the ads that are served. If the map is about something in particular, we are working on sending that information to Amazon. Otherwise, the books that show up will be about the map's starting location.

We are very eager to hear feedback on this. Leave a comment here, send us a feedback email, or leave your thoughts on our public forum.

The Platial Network Grows!

We've been testing out new things like mad since we moved our servers to the Valley and here are my two favorites...

#1. Visit the Platial Network. Platial community maps are cropping up all over the web and are on 20,000+ sites and blogs now. We wanted to start promoting these great maps and communities so we launched The Platial Network where you can get map inspiration and visit new member sites. It shows the most recently updated sites in the Platial network. We hope you'll give them a visit!

#2. Today we launched on our newest distribution partner site...Friendster! Keep a look out for your newsletter from them explaining how to get a Friendster Friend Mapper for your profile but in the meantime, you can help test and start using it now!

Simply start your map and make sure to enter your Friendster ID if you want your friends on the map!


Then click "Install" and it will be added immediately to the media box in your profile page! Visit us on Friendster!

Platial - Mmmm, Beefy

We never did a formal report on the status of Platial's migration.

The transfer was completed on Thursday, just after the previous blog post. Some may have noticed downtime of 0-4 hours depending on when nameservers throughout the Internet were updated.

We hope this didn't cause too many problems for folks, and if you notice any glitches, please feel free to email me directly at jake [at] platial.com.

--jake olsen

Platial FlashKit

Today, Platial released the Flash version of our MapKit, cleverly dubbed FlashKit :) FlashKit is not as robust as our javascript application but it's good fun and now increases the universe of MapKitters by about, um, 500 million!  Everyone has been clammering for a Flash version so here you go, please give feedback. We hope you like the dynamic image bar which shows the images from your map.

Also, you'll notice a new option on MapKit settings, Steal This Map which allows anyone to grab your map for their own site and continue to add to it. So if you have a thriving community map for sailing, hiking, buiking, kid-friendly places- whatever - you can get more places on your map and build bigger influence among your peers.

 

In case your wondering why we use the term steal when we respect copyright? It's a tribute of course to a great inspiration. And we think it's an important one. My friend Caterina always talks about the culture of generosity and we think it's a very important time for generous geography. I'm not sure why we had to use the ski mask guy but ok. Astronauts and ski masks, why not?

Here's an example here of a FlashKit map.

ADD PLACES TO THIS MAP or GET YOUR OWN MAPKIT

STEAL THIS MAP

Also good news for all you Friendster and Blogger.com users! It's easier than ever to publish to those services! And Wordpress and Typepad users, we have new stuff up our sleeves for you too!

Oh and speaking of attribution- we're fixing the obscured Yahoo! logo right now!

More News From Platial

Seems like there's a ton going on here these days. Late last night we deployed something we're all pretty proud of. There are still kinks but we hope you're going to love this as much as we do. Here are the highlights...

Platial Slider
By far the biggest product news is the little slider bar you can add to your maps. Give the slider a keyword and it will find the best stuff from around the web. We're sifting through 36,000,000 places to bring you the most relevant places for your map. And it's great! It works best for common terms which have been tagged often on Platial, Flickr, YouTube, Yahoo Local etc. Give it a whirl!

What else is new?

Not a bit of the code base has gone untouched. We've merged and re-architected a ton so its easier than ever to map just about anything.

We've deployed an entire tiling and clustering infrastructure to accommodate and store all of that new slider information across cities and categories. Our Chief Architect, Chris Goad, really deserves a medal for all this delicious geographic data handling and scoring wizardry.

We finally gave you layers. We had to do the back-end to handle of these source layers anyway so we said, lets just build the rest and finally offer layers! Another reason to make more maps!

Updated design and features, better performance on MapKits out in the wild. All 10,000 or so MapKits in the wild have the update, so dont worry- come get a Slider!

Performance will keep getting better- we're growing like mad and our servers are now on their way to Sunnyvale in the good hands of Omar Ahmad, our latest technical advisor and super scale guru.

MapKit available at Wordpress and Typepad.
The fine folks at Wordpress and Typepad consistently go all out for their users and we're thrilled to be a part of it.

Here are a few of our favorite new Typepad and Wordpress users; Messing About In Sailboats., Tia and Nishant Are Looking for Honeymoon Destinations

We want to give an extra shout out to Toni and Andy at Wordpress for going the extra effort for us although they don't typically allow javascript. We're thrilled to be a resource for your community!

Any Platial users out there without a blog? Now's a great time to get one for your new MapKits!

Please give us your feedback on all of this. We're still working out kinks and this will take a week or so.

Happy Mapping!

Di-Ann, Jason, Jake, Tracy, Rama, Chris, Sayumi, Tiger and David

Here is the official release...

Platial's TypePad Widget is alive

One Click Magic!