Friday, May 16, 2008

Ideas for StreetSize

Yesterday I sent two e-mails to Matt from http://streetsize.com

-------Email 1----------

Hello Matt,

Thank you for your wonderfull site. I think I'm the first Brazilian user, and I have invited my coworkers to join. I think that you'll achieve great success while you respect your users privacy. I'm also a Google Maps mashups developer.

Sugestions:

+ Let me change my public name. I have my login name, and my real name, but I wanna choose which one users will see when they find me on the map.
+ The GMarker should be smaller and with a darker colour to distinguish itself from the background

I have more sugestions that demands much more time from you than the simple ones above. Ask me if you wanna hear.

-----Email 2 ----

Hello again Matt,

I don't know what you have in mind for your site when it gets real crowded. You don't have to share with me your plans, I just wanna be able someday to meet a neighbor, with the help of your site, without knocking his door. It seems that for now you use the Keep It Simple motto, but following are some ideas that may help, if you want to add some complexity to it:

+ Like a social site, instead of location-based-only relationships, friends should be able to track themselves through a contact list.
- With a contact list, the user should be able to filter the map to only see his contacts on it.
- With a contact list, the user should be able to add contacts automaticaly with a Gmail/Yahoo/Hotmail crawler.
+ Users should be able to input where they will be in the future, this feature should be used to schedule parties and meetings
+ Users should be able to update continuosly their location through GPS equiped mobile phones.
+ Users should be able to maintain a history of previous locations, and they could even store whole tracks.

+ If you don't know, Fire Eagle (at http://fireeagle.yahoo.net/) seems to be a service that will share his users location with a limited number of websites that each user will choose. Your Street Size could explore this opportunity also by providing an API to webdevelopers.

Thank you for your time, I hope it's worth reading and good luck!

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