Platial News and Neogeography

Nearby Scavenger Hunt For iPhone on Now!

CONTEST STARTS TODAY and runs through MONDAY NIGHT! So get hunting for a chance to win a trip to NYC. Second prize also gets to have us develop their own feature request for Platial Nearby.

What better way to celebrate Labor Day Weekend than with a little mapping! This is an iPhone only game - players add as many places/photos from our handy-list of items and the winner will get a trip to NYC during the CONFLUX festival in September.

So go ahead and try to cram as many summer fun items into this weekend as you can! Good for nature lovers, urbanites, families, neogeographers and anyone else planning some good ol' fun this weekend.

Happy Mapping!

Nearby v1.3 Release Notes

While still not perfect, the new v1.3 has some huge improvements in map performance due to a developer we met at iPhone Dev Camp, Louis Gerbarg, and his wholesale replacement of our caching code.

* Better map performance for tile loading and panning.

* Photos taken in Nearby are now saved in your Camera Roll.

* Fixes the White Screen of Death bug.

* Dramatically reduces the frequency of crashes while saving photos.

* Fixes the Collections crash.

* Overall responsiveness improvements due to improved cache code.

* Adds feedback if nothing found in search.

* Adds many improvements to the interface, more images, more feedback about loading data.

What we are still actively working on for v1.4:

* Better map handling, flicking, zooming, pinching, etc.

* A fix for the 'stuck on a previous location' bug.

* Saving state of the app when you quit and come back.

* Making the newly added posts immediately available on the device.

Thanks for all the helpful feedback, via email, the forum, and the comments in App Store, we always love to hear from you.

New Faces

Just a few days ago we turned on some default user icons that had just been sitting in the archives. But, we didn't really know exactly who they all were, or what they had to do with Platial, or even that they had any kind of cohesion, as a group, at all. So I took a little time digging around and pondering. Ah ha! Prominent figures who were involved with, or influencers of, the Situationist International should be the new set.

Any guesses as to the identities of these figures?

You may wonder how we determine the assignment of one particular icon to a particular member. Well, all I can say is that it has something to do with our knowledge of how you represent yourself within the public space that is Platial.

If you don't love the magically chosen icon, you can upload anything you want right here.

Testing Out Ads on Frappr!

We thought it was about time to see if we could support ourselves with some minimal Frappr advertising. For this test we're just advertising our own iPhone app. Please let us know what you think. We're close to being able to let you opt-out of the ads as well.

You can see what it looks like here...

They Like Us! They Like Us!

We are extremely honored and flattered to see ourselves on the iTunes app store "Staff Favorites" list today. Wow!

We are still working hard to get a really solid and much-improved new version of Nearby out as quickly as we can and we'll keep you posted on our progress. We appreciate how patient people have been while we perfect this tool, and a special huge thanks to everyone whose been chiming in on our user forum at Get Satisfaction. I have been diligently recording all of the feature requests and bug reports, so your input is really helping us prioritize.

Nearby is a Multi-Platform Publishing Tool for Live Collaborative Mapping

As you all know, Nearby is the iPhone app that allows you to publish your favorite places onto Platial.
But now, Nearby is also the iPhone app that allows you to publish your favorite places, or your current location, to almost any website in the world!

Send live updates of your location, your observations, your ideas, and your memories onto a map on MySpace, Facebook, WordPress, TyepPad and more, or simply use the built in GeoRSS or KML anywhere you like.

(Instructions are below for linking your iPhone or iPod Touch to a Platial account, as well as setting up your Platial account to push your Nearby posts into specific maps.)

There is something even more powerful, and more exciting, than the geographic impressions of one person on one map, and that is the collected impressions of many people on one map. The ability to publish to a specific map can be enabled on thousands of iPhones simultaneously.

• Imagine a community of cycling advocates spending one day mapping all the dangers and obstacles they come across in a city, live.


• Imagine a cadre of civil rights observers feeding live data into a map about a political protest.


• Imagine a collection of athletes posting their first hand impressions and stories behind the scenes.


• Imagine promotional events where anyone with an iPhone is competing to post the most photos of a particular automobile, or someone wearing a particular brand of sunglasses.


• Imagine environmental groups live mapping toxic concentrations of air pollution, or washed up industrial detritus, or neighborhood trees infected with a certain parasite.


• Imagine a wash of people spreading out over a landscape looking for and mapping the things that connect them as a group.

There is also another benefit to setting your device up live this. Posts that are published into specific 'collections' increase the chances for those collections to appear to other Nearby users in the Collections tab while they are out and about in the world.

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How to set up your device and account:

Step 1: FROM YOUR IPHONE/IPOD TOUCH: Link your device to a free Platial account

Step 2: FROM THE WEB: Link your device to a map

Find one of your own maps, or an 'open' map, that you want to link your device to, then click 'post to this map from your iPhone'.

It will open your account page, and automatically fill in the map id field. All you have to do is simply SAVE the changes.

Step 3: FROM THE WEB: Embed the map almost anywhere

Back on the map itself, you will find the 'Embed' tool, along with 'RSS' and 'KML' feeds for all your publishing needs.

Step 4: FROM YOUR IPHONE/IPOD TOUCH: Happy Mapping!

Everything you add from Nearby will now go into your Places the way it always did, but will also be included in the linked map. You can replace or remove the linked map at any time.

Providence Initiative for Psychogeographic Studies

ProvFlux V is about to start this week, getting into the season for geo.

- and the reviews are good so far!

"THE END OF PSYCHOGEOGRAPHY AS WE KNOW IT"

"PSYCHOGEOGRAPHY WILL NEVER BE THE SAME AGAIN"

"MAKING LOVE TO THE CITY ONE STREET AT A TIME"

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There are also a bunch of satellite events happening around the globe, a couple right here in Portland.

Placespotting

One of the creators of a new map game called Placespotting was kind enough to send me an email to show off the cool project they've done.

The basic idea is this: you can use their site to solve and create map quizzes. You get a few hints and a close-up satellite image and you have to zoom the map in to match the image to win.

You can also create some riddles of your own and email them to all your friends or embed it on your own site as a picture. It's pretty fun. I'd love to have a profile so I could store which puzzles I've solved and also of course compare my speed in solving them to other people. I've got a little competitive streak! I want to own the high score.

Here's a video they made of the site in action.