Developers - Newton (~Boston), USA (no telecommute, sorry)
TripAdvisor is a super popular website in the Boston area -- we recently became the most-visited travel site on the web with over a million unique visitors per day.
While we have huge traffic, happy users and are crazy profitable, we're not standing still: We just launched a cool Facebook Connect implementation lets you see where you friends have been and ask them for advice. It takes advantage on our existing Facebook app which has quietly collected of the BILLION pins our community has collectively placed into online maps -- odds are pretty good that we'll find you someone to ask.
The bit that's interesting to me is the careful (at least retroactively viewed) plan that led here.
We built this app on Facebook which allow people to put pins on their map. It was done in the fury of initial Facebook apps which were land grabs -- no real sense of what the data'd be used for, but with a sense that a footprint in that space would be valuable. Also it turns out that a with a finely tuned UI, people love to put pins on maps! It taps into some baseline lower-reptilian instinct, which explains our consistent 8 million monthly users.
Fast-forward about 3 years and we've got about a billion pins worth of data. Enough data that it's the single most painful table to deal with! And our CEO comes up with what to do with them: use them to identify which of your friends can help you plan your trip. As aside, TA is so profitable that we can worry about making your experience better rather than using sleazy tactics to just keep you on the site.
After about three months worth of work, our small team built a Facebook Connect implementation that taps into the data we've got in pins and ties it together into a clean UI that people love. It's simple, barely needs explanation, and just plains works.
If you're the sort of person who might want to be part of this sort of thing (large datasets, great UIs, big ideas, small teams), please drop me a line: sanj@tripadvisor.com
We're doing exactly what you're doing (check us out @ http://zuupy.com), minus the "we have tons of data on which to leverage" part. Launch that feature as a separate widget product, and we'll be direct competitors.
Great job on the feature, by the way. I've used it multiple times myself, so far so good.
TripAdvisor is a super popular website in the Boston area -- we recently became the most-visited travel site on the web with over a million unique visitors per day.
While we have huge traffic, happy users and are crazy profitable, we're not standing still: We just launched a cool Facebook Connect implementation lets you see where you friends have been and ask them for advice. It takes advantage on our existing Facebook app which has quietly collected of the BILLION pins our community has collectively placed into online maps -- odds are pretty good that we'll find you someone to ask.
Marketing ended up calling it "Trip Friends", and there's a lot of great press about it: http://www.google.com/search?tbs=nws%3A1&q=%22trip+frien...
The bit that's interesting to me is the careful (at least retroactively viewed) plan that led here.
We built this app on Facebook which allow people to put pins on their map. It was done in the fury of initial Facebook apps which were land grabs -- no real sense of what the data'd be used for, but with a sense that a footprint in that space would be valuable. Also it turns out that a with a finely tuned UI, people love to put pins on maps! It taps into some baseline lower-reptilian instinct, which explains our consistent 8 million monthly users.
Fast-forward about 3 years and we've got about a billion pins worth of data. Enough data that it's the single most painful table to deal with! And our CEO comes up with what to do with them: use them to identify which of your friends can help you plan your trip. As aside, TA is so profitable that we can worry about making your experience better rather than using sleazy tactics to just keep you on the site.
After about three months worth of work, our small team built a Facebook Connect implementation that taps into the data we've got in pins and ties it together into a clean UI that people love. It's simple, barely needs explanation, and just plains works.
If you're the sort of person who might want to be part of this sort of thing (large datasets, great UIs, big ideas, small teams), please drop me a line: sanj@tripadvisor.com