Bostonsquares has been revamped!

[bsquares.livejournal.com]

A couple of months ago we posted to Live Journal members about a site
we created at http://www.bostonsquares.com. The site is an index of
local restaurants, bars and other businesses organized by square. We
received lots of great feedback from Live Journal and in the time
since then we've implemented a major overhaul of the site based on it.

http://beta.bostonsquares.com

Today we are releasing the beta of the new site. The purpose of this
is to get user feedback on the new design and features before we
release the live version on the original http://www.bostonsquares.com

Here are some of the new features that we are very excited about:

1. The site is now a "wiki" so any registered users can edit the
business information in our index. Now if you see something that is
out of date, incomplete, or that could be better written, you can
easily fix it yourself. If you think of a business that's missing,
you can also easily add it. It's extremely simple and very powerful.
We hope you will take a look.

2. We've brought back the search feature and it is better than ever
before. Try a search for "beer davis", for instance, if you are
looking for beer in Davis square. Watch for a list of search
suggestions that appear as you type.

3. Users can now submit comments and reviews as well as a positive
or negative rating of the businesses. These ratings are tallied to
form an overall popularity rating for the business. We accept
anonymous comments as well as comments from registered users.

4. You can now choose to sort businesses by popularity or alphabetical order.

5. There is a new, simplified home page that is more useful for new
users. Once you have an account, the home page is replaced with one
that is more personalized and includes more features , such as a
"recently updated businesses" list for our registered users

6. We have added a new "request update" feature for those times when
you notice that there is something wrong with a business listing but
you are not sure how to correct it. You can just simply click
"request update" to flag the business so that other users are alerted
to the problem.

7. We've added a lot more data. We've been hard at work taking
pictures in Porter and Central square, both of which are complete now.
I think it's probably safe to say that we are now the most complete
reference for the Red Line. But we aren't stopping there! We are
currently working to fill out our content in Copley and Kenmore
square, so be on the lookout for even more data.

8. All ads are now gone. We can't guarantee that they'll never
return, but for now we thought that they weren't worth the screen
real-estate they took up.


As always, we really appreciate any feedback you have.

Mark and Matt
Boston Squares

Comments

Re: citation

[mgbaron.livejournal.com]

Thanks for your helpful points.

I researched the wikipedia copyright rules some time ago and I thought they just required a link back. I'll verify this and obviously do whatever is necessary to comply with their rules.

Your second point is a good one. In fact we could probably use a lawyer at some point to draft a popular license/terms and conditions. I'm just a programmer and don't know a whole lot about copyright law!

We left out history in this revision for a couple of reasons. First, we felt that in order for the project to gain initial mass, it had to be dead simple to use. For the initial launch we determined that history features added unecessary confusion and therefore distracted from our main goal of ease of use. Furthermore, we wanted to bring this thing to life as soon as possible to see what the interest level was. For this reason, leaving out something like history which was not important to the core functionality was an appropriate way to save us a little time and help us launch the new site fast. Its possible that history will make its way into a future revision as a feature for power users; we'll see what the demand is like.

As for my preference, I would certainly prefer if descriptions are neutral. Within reason, we'll be trying to enforce this through our moderation process. Anyway, I think that slightly biased info is better than out of date or incorrect info so often found on a listing site. I should also note that the ability to rate/review a business is also there, though it's entirely possible that it needs more prominence. Take a look at the bottom of this page for instance:

http://beta.bostonsquares.com/davis/show/17

I really appreciate your taking the time to use and review the site. We are somewhat new to building a community site, and since we personally love what we have, we really want it to take off. Your feedback is very important.

Matt

Re: citation

[mattdm [typekey.com] (from livejournal.com)]

For a license, you may want to consider one of the Creative Commons licenses -- http://creativecommons.org/ . That's pretty easy, and well-respected.

The wiki history isn't so important if the site is getting vigorous moderation, but maybe at least list who last changed the entry?

And another comment -- right now, there doesn't seem to be an obvious way to simply rate a location without leaving a comment. It'd be nice to add that.

Oh, and (I know, I'm full of ideas) the "Other" category could really use a further breakdown. At first glance looking over the Davis Square stuff, it seems like a "Financial/Real Estate" breakout would help a lot.

And, also, you might want to consider using something like tags instead of categories. There's several places which are restaurants _and_ coffee shops, or restaurants and bars, or bars and music venues, etc. Rather than picking one place, or having duplicates, a tagging system would allow these places to show up whereever relevant. You wouldn't have to go with free-form tags like flickr -- you could have a preselected list.

Re: citation

[mattdm [typekey.com] (from livejournal.com)]

Oh, and one more thing. The wiki-editor is inconsistant in what it does with html entities (for example, my favorite — —).

Re: citation

[mgbaron.livejournal.com]

I think who last modified is a good idea because it helps promote editing in general.

You can rate a location without leaving a comment. If you do so, your rating won't show up under the comments section on the detail page. Your are correct, however, that is not at all obvious!

You hit the nail on the head with categories. Actually, during this migration we changed our database structure to something that is more like tags so that businesses can belong to multiple categories. We considered changing the name, but opted not to at this point. I think we'll add tags in the near future as an additional enhancement for user interaction. We are still thinking about the best way to do that. For now we wanted to preserver our neat, consistent organization. Perhaps your suggestion of a pre-selected list is a good one. However, I am a bit concerned with wiki spam here; perhaps a business might log in and set themselves up in every category? it is obviously getting out of control in the "Other" categories and something needs to be done. I would expect tags in the near future, what I'm not sure is whether it will be tags and categories or just tags... thoughts?

Re: citation

[mattdm [typekey.com] (from livejournal.com)]

I tried rating something that way, and noticed that it counted the number of comments as increased, but didn't actually _show_ a comment. (Look at McDonald's in Davis Square.) And, if someone left a comment, you can see by the color-coding what the rating is, but if they just leave a rating, that appears to be invisibile.

Oooh, here's another thing -- the recently-changed page (the default page when logged in?) only shows the three most recent changes. That's fine and non-overwhelming, but it'd be nice to have a link so one can continue back in time to the previous set of most-recent. Because if there's a lot of activity, those three will scroll out really fast. And, it'd be nice to have an easy way to see what's changed for _any_ square, not just your default one.

In addition to being convenient for frequent visitors, this serves two other important purposes. First, it lets new visitors know that the site is active and alive. And second, it helps fight wiki spam, because people watching those "what's changed" lists will see bad things quickly.

As for people over-using multiple tags in a spammy way, I think the best thing is a big "don't do that" notice, and make quick repairs when it happens. If it becomes a serious problem, making the accounts less anonymous so it's clear who the problem-users are may help -- require valid contact info, and if a particular edit becomes a problem, contact the person and work it out. (Of course, there's the trade-off with easy contribution.)

This thread is getting a bit unwieldy -- is there a better place to have this discussion? :)

Re: citation

[mgbaron.livejournal.com]

I think these are all great suggestions and I think they will probably work there way into the beta soon (along with several new features we are thinking about). Feel free to e-mail me if you have any other questions or suggestions.

Matt

Re: citation

[mgbaron.livejournal.com]

Oh...

I'm somewhat familiar with creative commons and I think it might be a good match. I'll do some more research on this.

Matt