Introducing a.placebetween.us
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!
13 comments
Cool idea Matt. I know you don’t want feature requests… but can you add a permalink? And/or mailto?
And what’s with the giant http://www.rl.tv picture at the bottom; it’s obscuring the search results.
I criticize (suggest?) because I like it.
@Kevin: Yes, permalink and mailto would be nice! We’ll add them over the next few days.
Could you let me know what browser you are using to view http://a.placebetween.us/ ? All of my testing is showing the ad graphic floating down under the search results, but it sounds like you’re seeing something different.
Thanks for the feedback.
Aron
Now with permalinks.
Great work…
another idea… would be cool if you also (maybe with a check box a user sould uncheck if he didn’t want it) would be if you also did the directions between the two addresses. that way you would be able to see if the places you suggest that are “half way” would work with real directions.
mike
@Mike: I totally agree – having direction information would improve the site. Right now, we are computing the midpoint using a very simple technique (it’s basically a “crow flies” halfway point). With access to directions, we could accurately compute a “driving midpoint” based on either mileage or driving time.
Unfortunately, I do not know of a way to obtain direction information from the popular services. I believe MapQuest offers this data, but with significant licensing fees.
If you know of sites which combine directions with their maps (aside from the map providers – Google, Yahoo, MapQuest & Microsoft), please let us know.
Glad to see that you liked the site.
Aron
I love this! But I needed your introduction to get what it could do for me. Maybe put a one or two sentence explanation on the page somewhere?
I was going to scratch this itch myself :-) Great site. It would be cool if it can be extended to N number of people, rather than just 2.
@Rekha: We’re going to add a couple sentences, and maybe even a brief faq–we keeping getting asked how to search for beer instead of coffee!
@Anand: We’re glad you like the site!
Thanks for the feedback. We’re getting a surprising number enhancement requests. We’ll update the blog when we figure out what we’re going to do about them!
[...] As Matthew has been chronicling, the interest in a.placebetween.us has kept us wide-eyed and browser-refreshing all weekend. [...]
@Rekha: Using a.placebetween.us should be a little more clear with tonight’s update. Please let us know your thoughts.
@Anand: We don’t support an arbitrary number of addresses yet, but we now let you drag around the midpoint marker. The software gets you started and you can fine-tune by hand.
My browser is Firefox 1.5.0.11
@Kevin: I’ve tested the latest version of the site with Firefox 1.0, 1.5, and 2.0. In all cases, the ads, del.icio.us link, and digg widget all float down as the search results are populated.
Could you please check and see if you are still experiencing the display problem? Last night’s update did alter how the search results are presented.
If you are still seeing a problem, please send me mail: aron-at-spotstory-dot-com