I left my room last night headed for a night of gweeping in the free-WiFi lobby at my hotel (compared to $10/night in the room). In the elevator, I ran into Jason Hoffman from Joyent (Spotstory is a customer) and was promptly invited to a Joyent event at the Lucky Lab Brew Pub.

I can’t comment on the stronger stuff, but the root beer at the Lucky Lab was wicked good (sorry, I need to keep my provincial New England self in check)!

Thanks so much to Jason, David, Kristie, and all the other folks from Joyent for hosting a great event.

This morning, my karma has been balanced, as Jason is using my HDMI-to-VGA converter for his Scaling a Rails Application from the Bottom Up Thursday morning tutorial.

Right now, I’m in Portland, Oregon getting ready for RailsConf 2007. Even though I’ve been here for less than an hour, I’ve already had an encounter with Internet celebrities!

If you follow the Ruby on Rails community (and who doesn’t), you have probably seen the Ruby on Rails vs. Java commercial by the RailsEnvy.com guys. We STOOD TOGETHER waiting for our luggage! I was in complete, geeky fan mode.

I introduced myself and mentioned that I work on both Spotstory and a.placebetween.us. They had heard of our site! Does this make me cool? It makes me a geek.

A wicked geek.

a.placebetween.us is one of the 9 stories mentioned in today’s edition of Yahoo! TV’s video blog The 9.  Go on over and check it out!

We’re the last item mentioned, or you can click on the sidebar to skip right to our 10 seconds.

Oh, and don’t forget to vote!

And More

a.pb.u has also received coverage from Will Femia at MSNBC’s Clicked, and Gadling has just posted a review as well.

Angela Gunn writes some kind words about Spotstory in today’s USA TODAY Tech_Space.  We wholly approve of her take-charge attitude:

Okay, people, I have a mission for our summer lolling-about-taking-photos time, which is fast approaching: I think we need to build out the wonderful Spotstory site past its New England roots.

[…]

[T]he site couldn’t help but be improved by a glimpse of wherever you are.

Like I said: we could not agree more!

As Matthew has been chronicling, the interest in a.placebetween.us has kept us wide-eyed and browser-refreshing all weekend.

Tonight, a.placebetween.us received a minor update in response to all the great feedback.

Highlights:

1. Improved interface: The first version of the site used some of the default search controls offered by Google’s Search API. This meant that there were multiple search buttons on the page, causing some confusion.
2. A draggable midpoint marker, allowing fine-tuning of the search results.
3. Directions from your address and your friend’s address to each search result.

a.placebetween.us sure has kept us from having a case of the Mondays!

Not only did we get to see it written up on a bunch of blogs, but now we’ve also found our way to the front page of del.icio.us, which is pretty awesome.

I haven’t been checking constantly, but we seemed to have topped off at number 4. All in all, pretty cool.

Thanks to everyone who’s checked out the site, bookmarked us, written us up, sent along their kind words, mentioned us to a friend, or–of course–sent enhancement requests!

We’ve had a good weekend as far as getting mentions on the Interwebs are concerned!

Spotstory has appeared on StumbleUpon, and  a.placebetween.us has as well.

a.placebetween.us has also received a very nice mention on Web Worker Daily.  Google Maps Mania has also picked up the news.

Update

a.placebetween.us gets written up by lifehack.org!

Spotstory is a bootstrapped company.  This means that we spend a lot of time working out of our homes, as well as at coffee shops, bakeries, and what have you.

Early on, Aron and I often needed to find meeting places that were midway between our houses.  Or, midway between us and some other person we were going to meet.

One day we said, “You know, there really should be a website where you can give it two addresses, and it will find all of the coffee shops halfway between them.  This statement was repeated a couple times a week for several months.

Well, the other night Aron couldn’t sleep, so he decided to whip up just such a website!

So, today, we’d like to introduce a.placebetween.us, a website where you can search for coffee shops, or whatever, between two addresses.

Just go to the site, enter two addresses, and the type of place you’re looking for (it defaults to coffee!)   Let us know what you think!

Oh, one final note: we introduced a.placebetween.us because it’s useful to us, fun, and it didn’t take too too much work: don’t worry, we’re still working on  Spotstory full time!

In the spirit of further opening communication, we’ve removed comment moderation from the blog.

People have mentioned they don’t like waiting for their comments to appear.  Some have also complained about having to register just to leave a comment. 

We can understand how all of that can put a damper on the conversation.  So, commenting is now wide open for everyone.

We’ve put a spam filter in place.  Hopefully, it won’t catch any of your insightful comments!  Hopefully, it will catch the several hundred spam comments we get each month.

Discuss!

Spotstory has been a growth experience for me.  Sometimes I’m aware of this while it’s happening, while sometimes I realize, suddenly,  that I look at certain things differently.  This is a story about the latter.

So, last month I’m checking out the website of a new company from one of the industries in which I used to work.  I was simultaneously dumbfounded, depressed, and annoyed by what I saw.

I’m not going to bore you with details.  My intent isn’t to call out these folks in particular.  Plus, you’ve already seen this website replicated countless times: stock photos of impossibly earnest or happy, diverse, and well groomed people staring intently into computer screens.

Of course there’s the obligatory press-release in press-release-ese and the marketing copy that’s relevant to, I dunno, somebody.  You know, its full of proactive language that sounds positive, but in the end you’ve got no idea what they’re actually selling.

I’m looking at this and my immediate reaction is: “These people would be much better off with a blog.”

I was surprised by this! I said “Huh, I would not have said that half a year ago.”

Then, blogs struck me as somehow possibly useful, but also sort of superficial: window dressing for your site, in the same league as rectangles with rounded corners.

Today, I can’t image how a company can not have a blog.

Though our blog has its ups and downs, I love it!  It gives us a way to communicate what Spotstory is about, explain its features at length, and keep users appraised of new releases or upcoming features.  It gives users a way to easily talk back to us.

It also allows us to give back to the communities we’re a part of by helping to promote events, and as a vehicle for contributing technical information and source code.

It makes it very easy to talk with people without having to rely on industry press or a sales force.  It’s lightweight and agile. 

Plus, All of this information on the blog attracts search engine traffic.  A lot of that traffic then follows through to our main site, that is, our product!

This is how we’ve used  blogging.  In a lot of ways, we’re a very small fish dealing with a very large audience.  Imagine what a company in a niche market serving a well defined customer base could do.

I’m not saying a blog-only website is right for everyone.  Everything I’m talking about could probably done with a traditional web site.  In fact, I’m sure we’ll have one of those too some day, though I hope we manage to avoid the bad stock photos.

So, my friends out there in the old world, think about blogging!  Sure, issue your press release, but also write an accompanying blog entry in plain (BS-free) language that your customers can understand.  Write technical white papers, but also have an ongoing open dialog about how your product can be used.  Have a bug tracking system, knowledge base, and a product roadmap, but have a frank and honest conversation with your users about the strengths, weaknesses, and direction of your product on a daily basis.

Your customers will thank you, you’ll learn a lot, and you’ll have a lot of fun.