PlanetEye

Friday, May 9th, 2008

PlanetEye maps everywhere

We are so proud of the smooth integration of photography into our maps that we wanted to make sure people can take them away and publish them everywhere they want.

So, with the most recent release, we’re giving away a snippet of HTML code that you can use to embed your map into any website. The embedded map is interactive and lets users move around to discover your photos without having to visit the PlanetEye website.

For example, you can drag the map and as you do the photos at the top will be updated to include the best ranked photos in whichever area of the map is currently visible. You can also mouse over the photos and a little yellow viewfinder will hint at where that photo was taken. This feature works for your own photos or those from other people that you have collected into Travel Packs.

For the map below, I collected into a Travel Pack one photo from each city where PlanetEye has a local expert to create a cool visualization of the rich collection of our collaborators and the cities they represent. Go ahead, play with it:

Since the data is streamed from our servers, every time the embedded map is loaded elsewhere, any new photos added will automatically appear there. If for, example, you are planning a trip to France and and looking to blog about the journey, you may embed the map and as you travel, take photos and upload them to PlanetEye. This will let your readers follow your adventures through the interactive map.

These maps can be embedded in three sizes: 300×300, 425×350 and 640×480. The first one is too small to allow photos to be displayed within it, but we thought it would still be useful as a way to provide an updated map of your photos as you modify your collection.

Enjoy.

Technorati Tags: PlanetEye, Photography, Travel Pack, Travel

• Posted in  Development, PlanetEye
• 1 Comment »

Saturday, March 1st, 2008

New in Beta: Open to the Public

After five months of our initial launch in private beta mode, we’re proud to announce that PlanetEye.com is now open to the public. While we know there is still a lot of work ahead of us, we’re confident that the feedback of the hundreds of people who participated in the private beta has led to amazing features that the general community will love.

If you haven’t done so, now is good time to check the website, as the vast majority of the pages can be browsed without an account: the maps, the city guides, the local expert guides, the photo pages and a lot more. Now, if you want to upload your own travel photographs, register for an account and create beautiful interactive maps of your trips around the world and share them with friends and family.

Notice how the map will automatically group your photos to maintain the display uncluttered and will create shortcuts to the various regions of the map where there are photos. All this as long as you geotag your photos.

We are already working on a new set of features to make the experience even richer, but if you have a suggestion on how to improve the site do not hesitate to leave us some feedback.

• Posted in  Development, PlanetEye
• No Comments »

Sunday, February 3rd, 2008

New in Beta: Local Expert Guides

A quick look through our website metrics is enough to conclude that our users spend about half their time in our map. We have to admit it was designed for its coolness factor and at least at first sight it is one of the most interesting features of our site. Yet, our philosophy on learning about a destination calls for deep knowledge that originates from passionate locals, so we have been working very hard to release a feature that we hope we’ll be a great research tool for travellers: the Local Expert Guide.

A Local Expert Guide represents that precious conversation that takes place hours before you go on a trip and that provides all the insider information that will shape your experience. It is based on first hand experience by people that live in these cities and is current. A small army of writers around the world are already contributing to it, but with our latest release we are bringing more advanced tools to their production process so they can generate even more compelling content. If you are into blogs you’ll probably love the new layout. If you are search engine, you definitely will think highly of us.

Of course, we’ve implemented this page with the unique PlanetEye geotagging approach. Soon, you’ll notice that as posts are written about new places, restaurants, events and others, they will be properly geotagged so you can follow the link (clicking on the little map below the post) to appreciate the location in our interactive map.

How great are our Local Expert Guides? Check out what Su-Jit Lin writes about Mardi Gras, happening right now in New Orleans. (Registration required)

• Posted in  Development, PlanetEye
• 2 Comments »

Sunday, January 20th, 2008

New in Beta: A map for your photos

At PlanetEye we are all about great geotagged photography, and while we had created an amazing map to display the best photos in our collection we thought it was about time we allowed each one of our users to showcase their own personal photos in the map. The result is a brand new Profile page that displays a map with your photos, displaying the best ranked, grouping them by region and allowing you to zoom in to the point where each photo can be found on the map. We think this page will be very popular as it is an excellent way to display at a glance where your photo journeys have taken you around the world.

We also created a much better organized layout for the List View of photos where you can now see Title and Description at a glance. Notice in the snapshot below how I’m not very good at adding descriptions to all my photos, yet it is easy to identify the ones who have a description by looking for the little “sticky note” icon at the bottom of the photo.

And since we believe users are going to have an incentive to organize and document their photographs, we also created a batch Edit module as a companion to the already great Uploader and Geotagger. As a starting point this Edit module allows you select multiple photographs and either change title, description or even delete them. We plan to add other image operations down the road.

Another feature that we’ve been working hard to implement is a simple “back-button”. With the advent of Rich Internet Applications such a simple operation like going back to the previous page has suffered because developers can make lots of things happen within the same page avoiding refreshes. The result is a confusing user experience that is not consistent with the mental model that most people had created for web application. We knew that offering all that interactivity on our map would frustrate users if every time they hit the back-button they were taken back to the home page, even if they had spent precious minutes discovering amazing locations around the world. To be fair, other sites with maps have tried to implement this functionality but we’ve found it to be less than intuitive, so we are hoping our approach makes a lot more sense to our users. Try it and let us know what you think.

• Posted in  Development, PlanetEye
• No Comments »

Saturday, December 22nd, 2007

New in Beta: Top Photos

It has been a fantastic year for the development team at PlanetEye. We’ve worked hard to materialize what was barely a collection of ideas, research and mocks a few months ago. With a new build coming out almost every week for the last couple of months the challenge has been to keep our focus on the things that matter. With our last build of the year we solidify our approach to explore beautiful destinations through amazing photography.

In a previous post I explained how we could show the top photos for any of our cities in the City Guide. Now we’ve implemented the same algorithm on our map regardless of what you’re looking at. Regardless of whether the maps is showing a few blocks, a city, a larger region or an entire continent, we will always show you the best ranked photographs in the visible area of the map. For those of you that love the technical details I should add that the main difference between this algorithm and what we used to do before is that in the past we would pick the top photo from each bubble. The challenge was that not all bubbles had a great collection, so now we are searching deep inside each bubble to get all the best photographs across the entire set.

Finally, for those of you that have a Flickr account and have taken the time to geotag your photos, enjoy our improved uploader with Flickr support. Because of the capabilities for the Flickr API, we can show you thumbnails of your photos before you decide to upload them to our servers. Bring them all.

There are still many features in the works and the new year will surely be amazing. Stay tuned.

Have a merry season.

• Posted in  Development, PlanetEye
• No Comments »

Saturday, December 15th, 2007

New in Beta: City Guides

While we’re very excited about the way our City Guides are evolving and becoming the hub for all the interesting content we are finding on every destination, they become more interesting when you understand all the technology that goes into them.

The same technology that allows us to quickly figure out which are the top photographs for any given region of the map is being used to render the widget at the top of the page, giving you a quick summary of the wonders that a city has to offer. A similar query is run for the Attractions, Hotels & Restaurants listings, except that any references that the PlanetEyeBot keeps finding around the web will influence the ranking of each place. We call it the “noise” factor: the more a place is reviewed and talked about on the web, the better it will do in our rankings.

Another very important element of any city guide is the information that a Local Expert may be able to share with you. There are already a number of such experts actively writing brief reviews, articles and other news to help you understand what the city is all about. Here are some excerpts of what has been published recently:

Contemporary art galleries stand side by side with 17th century churches; priests scurry off to the Vatican bypassing a young couple kissing in the shadow of the Basilica; and soccer is considered the new religion. There’s a new restaurant popping up every month; there’s a new bar opening every week, and you’ll soon realize there will be something different to do everyday! Whether it be a cappuccino craving at 3 a.m., hunger for a Thai-fusion dinner on a lonely Tuesday night, or a need for some cool jazz in a cozy bar, we’ll give you all that and more. Chiara, Rome.

Let’s talk for a minute about Yo’ Mama’s. Yo’ Mama’s hamburgers are so delicious and so good, my eyes roll to the back of my head in sheer sensory ecstasy when I get a taste of that meat. Yo’ Mama’s buns so sweet and thick, I can’t even get the whole thing in my mouth … but I do try my damnedest. Yo’ Mama’s – pure, unadulterated, all-American pleasure. Su-Jit, New Orleans.

You should also take a look at our brand new Upload and Geotag features as they have been optimized for those photographers that have a great collection of travel photos and need to manage many files at once.

For example, if you happen to know the name of a particular location where you took half a dozen of photos, just enter the name of the landmark, select multiple photos at once and drag them on the indicated yellow star.

• Posted in  Development, GPS/Geotagging
• 1 Comment »

Sunday, December 2nd, 2007

New in Beta: Our Home Page

One of the most important objectives we’ve tried to accomplish with the product we are building is to offer an experience that allows users to discover new destinations and be inspired to travel. With the latest build we are one step closer to deliver on such experience by engaging the traveller in a very visual journey that starts with our Home Page.

Throughout the months of research we realized that most offerings out there had taken a very traditional approach to travel planning: take the travel guide in its booklet format and translate to the online world without major changes. The result was a collection of web properties that were full of text reviews, editorials, lists of hotels and absolutely nothing that would inspire.

With our new Home Page, we wanted to engage the traveller with some of the best travel photography, no prelude. We call the widget at the top of the page a “culture shot” and you’ll have to agree it is smooth and inspiring. In case you are wondering, each one of those images are real images from our database and they are all geotagged (notice the little viewfinder displaying the lat/long).

Further down, you get a sample of what our mapping technology has to offer with a widget displaying the 10 most popular destinations in our system. Our maps are well beyond the usual mashup and we hope these samples will be enough for users to start exploring the world at their own leisure. On the right column we’ll feature some of the local talent helping us document their cities, completing what we think will be a compelling offering: great photography, advice from passionate locals and all of this integrated into beautiful and engaging maps.

Since we first launched our private beta, we haven’t stopped seeding the site with new photography and we believe you should be able to find something interesting in many of the major travel destinations around the world. Go ahead, discover your next travel destination.

• Posted in  Development, Online Travel Services, PlanetEye
• No Comments »

Friday, November 23rd, 2007

New in Beta: PlanetEyeBot

By Juan Gonzalez

The most important feature we are releasing this week is a little application we call the PlanetEyeBot. Its objective is to crawl the web searching for geotagged information that can be added to our map. Just as any other web crawler, its mission is to find pages on the web that have information that may be relevant to our users. What makes it unique is the fact that only pages with good geotagged data are analyzed and instead of keeping a full copy of every page, it only stores the information that is necessary to identify such data point on a map, typically the address, lat/long pair, brief description and a URL to the source.

How is this information going to be used by PlanetEye? Each geotagged location we find out there will become a point in our map or, if it is already there, finding more web references to the same location will make it more popular in our map. And even as we continue to add thousands of new data points each week, our MediaDots technology will keep the performance of the map steady. Soon, with enough data, our map will provide an accurate representation of the places around the world that get the most attention, whether through specialized ranking sites (Wine Spectator), sophisticated bloggers (Gridskipper) or specialized travel resources (Travel and Leisure Magazine). Of course, we are making sure that only content that is relevant to our travel-centric mission is added.

If you are a webmaster, you should know that our crawler identifies itself as a crawler with the following signature: Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; PlanetEyeBot/0.1; +http://www.planeteye.com) For everyone else, we will have a page dedicated to showcase the sources we cover to make sure our users can grow confident that we’re only adding information that will be relevant to their travel related activities. Finally, every place in our map will have its own page where we will list the many web sources that referred to it. In the case of an award-winning restaurant, chances are the list will be long.

On a different front, we continue to improve the usability of our map. This week we are introducing an “always-on” media panel that will eliminate the confusion that the collapsing version created. No matter where you are, you will always see a selection of the top ranked elements in that area of the map.

It is only one row of photos, but we believe that making the interaction easier was a priority. Notice the new message at the top of the map indicating how many photos are shown in the media panel out of the total of photos available in the current area of the map. A quick way to see how many photos we have at any given time is to zoom out to view the entire world. The count should be accurate… and FAST!

• Posted in  Development, PlanetEye
• 1 Comment »

Friday, November 16th, 2007

New in Beta: Large images

It was a little bit ironic to have such a great collection of the best travel photos around the web and not showcase them in their full splendor.  With our latest release the team has made it possible to view each photograph in its original size.  You’ll notice that the Media Preview panel that appears whenever you click on any image on the map has been redesigned:

 The basic information about the photograph is readily available without any particular action and at the bottom-left corner there is a brand new link to the “Photo Page”, which is a page with all the detailed information plus handy controls to navigate through the entire collection of a particular photographer.   We have made this an HTML page to enable direct linking to any photograph in our database, like these amazing photos from Marco in Rome.  We decided that if you are curious about a given photographer and browse his/her personal profile, clicking on each image should also take you to the “Photo Page”; after all it’s all about great photography.

Another element that should make this page very useful is a mini map of the geotagged location of the photo.  Not only will it show the precise geotag, it will also do a reverse-lookup and tell you the name of the location, sometimes the city, sometimes a much more precise text description (very useful when you’re not certain what the name of that little town you came across in a road trip was).

You will also notice that many cities are looking far more interesting these days.  We owe it all to the amazing group of photographers, like Amanda from Sydney, whom have taken the lead in showing us their cities from their very personal perspective.   This is a nice little departure from the usual travel photography that you would expect to find in our site, but signals of great things to come in the near future. 

• Posted in  Development, PlanetEye
• No Comments »

Friday, October 26th, 2007

New in Beta: Breadcrumbs

With the Culture Shot we introduced a new way to discover destinations. The idea is to detach geography from the process of deciding where to go next. However, we realized it was a little daunting to click on one of the images in the home page, be taken to a new location on the map and not be sure where exactly we had arrived. Most people would have to zoom out until some familiar geographic feature was visible. This week we have focused on making this process a lot easier:

• We added a breadcrumb object at the top of the map, visible at all times. It is constantly telling you where in the world you are. It is clickable, giving you shortcuts to jump back to the zoom level that best displays your current city and country.

• Although there was a zoom control already, many people suggested it wasn’t easy to use. We have not only improved the look of the zoom control to make it compatible with the general look of the site; we have improved its usability by adding (-) and (+) controls to the sides of the slider to move one zoom level at a time. And it will always be visible, even if you open the Media Panel.
  
  A very cool thing to try is to keep the Media Panel open while you zoom in and out of the map: the contents of the Panel will update to include a selection of the best photos in whichever area you’re looking at.

The world is a more interesting place to discover. We’ve imported thousands of the best travel photos we could find in Panoramio. We’ve focused on some of the top travel destinations such as Cairo, Dublin, St. Petersburg, Copenhagen, Budapest, Edinburgh, Beijing, Maui, Hong Kong, Istanbul, Venice, Lisbon, Madrid and Prague. Use the Search box to find them on the map. And if you agree with us that these are great travel photos, be sure to give them 5 stars when you rate them.

• Posted in  Development, PlanetEye
• No Comments »