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RE: MyTown

SwiftWalker — Wed, 01 Mar 2006 17:25:13 GMT

BRodda (2/28/2006)

Here you go, a nice transmission for the future. It's really an interesting watch. It's a concept film about the future of the internet. Slightly silly, but the concepts are sound.

http://mccd.udc.es/orihuela/epic/

Actually, that's quite fascinating. I kept waiting for the punchline (Googlezon was pretty funny), I kept waiting for the plot (really wasn't one), and I kept watching. Interesting dissection of developments to-date and an extrapolation into the future.

I think I know the future: The rise of "scene leaders" who will be the 21st Century's version of newspaper editors and TV news executives. Maybe it'll be computers, but I see it being a bunch of people who will collate, process, edit, and disseminate an aggregation of news, blogs, and trusted "feet on the street" reports.

RE: MyTown

BRodda — Tue, 28 Feb 2006 13:15:51 GMT

Here you go, a nice transmission for the future. It's really an interesting watch. It's a concept film about the future of the internet. Slightly silly, but the concepts are sound.

http://mccd.udc.es/orihuela/epic/

RE: MyTown

Ben Rowland — Mon, 27 Feb 2006 17:22:37 GMT

that is a pretty good point. They have created a content engine by doing this. Their tool can literally feed content into their engine. Of course, to what end? Ad serving, content analysis, what? Certainly they don't want to be a web host, but it looks like they are doing that, too. Google is about to take over the world -- it's scary, actually.

RE: MyTown

BRodda — Mon, 27 Feb 2006 09:47:59 GMT

I think the plan is to have more people generate content in a format that is optimized for how Google indexes things.

Google is content poor, they primarily aggregate information and content. I think both this and Google Base are a content play.

RE: MyTown

Ben Rowland — Sat, 25 Feb 2006 19:34:04 GMT

Just wait until you see the new version of our tool... it should rock. Current tool is nice, but it is hard to keep massive sites organized, there is no internal (or external) search capability, no automatic nav bar generator, no spell check, no multiple simultaneous file upload (great for photo galleries), etc.

There is something to be said about simplicity, though, which is what they are after. How long before Google ads their ads to those templated websites? That's the plan, isn't it?

Ben

RE: MyTown

SwiftWalker — Fri, 24 Feb 2006 13:40:41 GMT

I saw that, too. Rowland, you should contact Google, Tecture's web tool is pretty slick...just need a spell checker and the ability to have people download Excel files and it's ready to rock-n-roll.

RE: MyTown

BRodda — Fri, 24 Feb 2006 07:38:27 GMT

It's not that great. Sure the 100M of space is great, but it is templated all to hell and doesn't even give you the option of doing ANY HTML. At least GeoCites gave you that option. I'm going to make on just becasue I'm trying to get people to join my RPG and I know that having a Google page will put me higher in the organic searches.

RE: MyTown

Ben Rowland — Thu, 23 Feb 2006 17:48:59 GMT

I did see it:

http://blogs.pcworld.com/techlog/archives/001496.html

I know a bit about that field. The screenshot looks simple. It will be interesting to actually see it in action, which hasn't been possible yet due to the usual "high demand" it is experiencing. ;-)

Ben

RE: MyTown

BRodda — Thu, 23 Feb 2006 14:50:14 GMT

I meant that as a joke. Most built to flip companies never flip and just sit there until the cash is gone. If I was going to build it to flip it I would already be 1/6 of the way done designing it; but I have no business model so it sits in my "idea pile".

As for your example of your company; that's why I'm taking long hard looks at my ideas and deciding if I really want the spend 5-10 years doing what is required of the company.

And speaking of building websites, did you see the new free Google web-page builder and hosting?

www.pages.google.com" target=_"blank" class="SmlLinks">www.pages.google.com

RE: MyTown

Ben Rowland — Thu, 23 Feb 2006 11:34:52 GMT

Build to flip is kind of a no-no. If you go into it expecting an exit, that probably says a lot about you -- namely, that you don't have the patience to actually run it.

I ran into this with some business partners, in fact. We started a web software company. Our customers were small businesses. I was perfectly happy building websites for our customers all day long. Though that wasn't our reason for being in business, it was still so fundamental to the success of the business that it had to be done. Even though we were just providing a software product that was involved in running the actual website, it still required knowledge of what it took to build and run a successful website for a small business.

My point is that they went into the business with the expectation that we would build it, flip it, and get out. It never occurred to them that they might have to spend the rest of their working lives building websites for businesses day in and day out to make the business successful.

RE: MyTown

BRodda — Thu, 23 Feb 2006 06:57:39 GMT

Biuld it to flip? Not a bad idea. I'll have to take a look at what you suggested to see what will work.

RE: MyTown

Ben Rowland — Wed, 22 Feb 2006 16:58:51 GMT

I thought my idea was a nice tie-in to your post with the Trillian Dollar Matrix, actually. That's why I kind of identified it as a larger opportunity. So, don't write any code yourself -- raise some money and bring in some developers. Google will buy it eventually and integrate into they stuff anyway.

RE: MyTown

BRodda — Wed, 22 Feb 2006 12:57:30 GMT

Pure and simple, speed. It would be easier to plug into an existing API than to code from beginning. I'm barley able to code my way out of a paper bag, but even I can do a mash-up with the Google Maps API.

RE: MyTown

SwiftWalker — Tue, 21 Feb 2006 20:52:08 GMT

Google Earth has some of that functionality. I love that program. You can search for golf courses, bars, restaurants, etc. It also shows where commuter train and El/subway lines run, so it becomes very helpful in determining if a house you're looking at is convenient to public transportation.

Maybe if you added a function to rate the quality of each El station...

RE: MyTown

Ben Rowland — Tue, 21 Feb 2006 18:10:22 GMT

Why bother with the Google Maps bit? That's an add-on. The opportunity here is much greater. Build a website that maps community preferences for the offline world.

Google maps preferences for websites by calculating inbound links and AdWords clicks, right? But what site tracks preferences for offline things -- anything from restaurants to bars to vacation spots. Put a recommendation engine on top of it, have users fill out their profile, type in a geographical region, and voila, the engine spits out great canoe trips in Wyoming.

Of course, add a ranking system to the thing (kind of like NetFlix) so users can rank places. It would be like Wikipedia in that users would create and edit all of the content, upload images, etc.

It's a virtual yellow pages + recommendation engine + rating system.

Ben

RE: MyTown

BRodda — Tue, 21 Feb 2006 10:19:59 GMT

Ning.com lets you build your own Google Maps Mashup. Here is a link to some, http://googlemapsmania.blogspot.com/2006/02/ningcom-powers-3-new-google-maps.html.

Ning has a good track record, its Marc Andersen's new company.

RE: MyTown

BRodda — Tue, 21 Feb 2006 10:14:10 GMT

The intent is for tourism and "virtual tourism". If you combine this site with an IPod you have a virtual tour guide.

If your an avid hiker you can find good vistas and find what people think of various trails and parks.

There are tons of little hidden attractions all over the world, little stories that don't make it into the history books.

Imagine selecting Chicago and searching for "gangsters" and being able to get a map and podcast about all the hangouts and where various famous events happened. (I know there is more to Chicago than gansters, but I'm thinking about what people are passionate about to post info about).

Like I said, monetization is the problem.

RE: MyTown

Ben Rowland — Mon, 20 Feb 2006 14:30:50 GMT

Other interesting Google Maps applications include:

Crime stats overlay: http://www.chicagocrime.org/

Ride finder: http://labs.google.com/ridefinder

Traffic: http://traffic.poly9.com/

RE: MyTown

SwiftWalker — Mon, 20 Feb 2006 14:04:54 GMT

I'm not sure what this idea would do for anyone, or what the purpose is...but I like it! Kind of a Web 2.0 version of Mr. Microphone. You remember Mr. Microphone: "Hey good looking, we'll be back later to pick you up!"

Maybe you should troll through the other Ronco products and see what we can adapt to the modern age.

MyTown

BRodda — Mon, 20 Feb 2006 09:10:44 GMT

I'm a little bit skittish about putting this one up, but what the hell.

Project Name: MyTown

Project Description: MyTown is a pure Web 2.0 play. It uses Google Maps with geocache/physical addresses for interesting features or historical elements.

People are able to create audio tracks of either a brief history, a review of the services or other interesting information in mp3 format (I'm thinking podcasts like files). They then upload them with the Long/Lat or Adress they want they file to talk about. They then tag it and confirm the location before it is uploaded to the database.

People then can search by tag or zip-code and then upload the Podcasts that they like or just listen to them on the website.

Problem: No idea how to monetize this sucker....