Flaming Desks is a blog…

I got rid of the 3D specs and made a bespoke “g”. What are people’s thoughts?

ParkAtMyHouse.com - the service that lets you do exactly that.

Our mate Jay, who runs the very excellent auctions-for-experiences website, Sweemo.com just pointed me in the direction of a service called Park At My House.

I was gonna explain what it is, but between the picture above, and the name, I think that’s pretty obvious.

Note to team; can we all have a play with this to see what stuff they’re doing that’s good?  Cheers.

Taking on board the comments from my original logo post, and following further discussion at Nonsense HQ, find below some more evolved designs. The annotations should guide you through, but basically, these are focusing on a more Web 2.0 sort of style; maintaining gradients as per the favoured 1st set of designs, but considering a couple more rounded, playful sort of typefaces.

Oh, and as requested by our mate Nathaniel at ActionAid, you can click on the scribbles below and view them at a larger scale!

Comments please.  If all else fails we’ll get one from the web 2.0 logo creatr…

More still to come.  Mike’s “flames-from-the-side-to-make-it-look-like-its-moving” idea is one I’m gonna look at.  (But Rob, your “just use a photo of a desk on fire” thought is going nowhere mate.  We all agree its a great marketing idea - maybe you should stick to that…)

I’ve updated the prototype today to make the geolocation during registration much more resilient. All of the scenarios are now covered - it does its best to locate the street address of the company, then falls back to the city, and eventually the country if it can’t locate the city.

I’ve also updated the interface on this page with instructions that change depending on the accuracy of the geo search.

The top 3 items on the outstanding list in this post have been sorted. It took almost as long as it did to get to the original prototype, but I was being distracted by Olympic medals for GB!

Update : Now when view the home page of the app it will try and figure out your country from your IP address and centre the map on that country.  I’ve used the open source IP to country database from MaxMind which is 99.3% accurate.  I think this is working but short of a round-the-world trip I’ll need people to let me know if it’s not!

I’ve been thinking about ways to represent cities and countries on the global map when we have lots of desks at each location.  I’d visualised opaque circles of differing sizes representing the differing numbers of desks at each location, and had started to think about how I’d generate the data for that.  Seems I may not now have to if this Techcrunch article is anything to go by.  Finder lets you store and share geo data and Maker will let you build interactive maps from the data that look like they’ll be what I need.

Another interesting link in the Techcrunch article is to Mapufacture, recently bought by the people behind Finder and Maker, which lets you build composite maps from your own, or other people’s data (via a feed).  So I’m thinking we should make our office locations available via a feed, with a link for each office to booking forms on the site (or mobile version of it).  I’m envisaging a mobile user with a mapping app, where they add their favourite feeds which they can use to discover things around them that are of specific interest to them.  Flaming Desks could be part of that user’s landscape if the desks are made available via a feed.

Fire Eagle from Yahoo’s Brickhouse was released today. Basically it keeps an individual’s location up-to-date, usually via their mobile device. We could use it to tie in to Flaming Desks so that we automatically search for desk locations near the user. Not so useful if you are accessing it from your laptop or desktop, but when we finish the mobile version (!) it could be handy.  Also a good way of getting it out there.

Possibly a better tie up would be with geographicly based social networks, some of which are conveniently listed on this fire eagle blog post.

Airbeds... pah! It's all about the desks...

http://airbedandbreakfast.com/

Except it’s airbeds / sofas that they’re renting out and they’re charging.  That said the interface is great - very much in the direction that we’re heading with the mapping.

Techcrunch said they set up with $20,000 of seed capital… I think we can beat that with our $0.00 slush fund!

This version of the app wouldn’t normally be shown to a client but, in the spirit of this project, here it is.

http://www.flamingdesks.com/app/

What I’ve concentrated on here is the trickiest bit : getting global geo location data into the app, which is relatively easy using the geocoder from Google. With this version you can register any address in the World and it will store your details in the database and plot all of the addresses on a global map.

I’d stress at this point that there is a lot more work to do! Amongst the outstanding work is:

• strategy for addresses which can’t be found. At the moment you can move markers, but I’d like you to be able to add a marker to a country and then move it around within that country to position it.
• There’s a bug if you search again once it has found an address : it creates two markers
• The geocoder doesn’t always find the address. I try a different variation of the address lines if this happens, but this needs a lot more work to make it run smoothly. There are probably lots of valid addresses that it won’t currently work for : it needs to try different combinations of addresses, starting with the most specific and working back to the city and country only : then hopefully we’ll get a marker for every address that’s entered.
• Implement photo uploads
• Implement company type drop down
• All of the desk functionality : adding desks within an office etc
• Filtering on the front end of the map
• Search and zoom on the front end of the map (i.e. search for London and it zooms to London from the globe and you can see relevant offices plotted on it)
• Implement the Google marker manager in anticipation of 1000s of offices (!) to help performance
• Forgotten password functionality
• Login, my account etc
• Plug in the design

For now, if you’re interested in giving it a go please do. All data will be thrown away, but if you’ve been interested enough to test it, we’ll put you on the list for a notification when it goes live, so feel free to put your real email address in. If you find any addresses that it fails for, or you spot any pitfalls, bugs, or have any suggestions, please post the details in a comment.

[winces and hits the publish button...]

I’ve been playing around with the Google Maps API to try and use it for registration of desks. I think I’ve got it sorted :

1. Collect basic info about company and contact at the company
2. Take company address (company doesn’t need to make this public, but we need it)
3. Show map with address marked on it [still to decide how to handle it if Google can't find the address]
4. User drags marker on map until happy with location, then moves to next step

And here’s the map bit:

Try putting in your own address and clicking ‘go’. Try dragging and dropping the flame around - you can see that the latitude and longitude changes as you do this.

This isn’t particularly clever stuff but I’m pleased with it all the same!

Thanks for the comments we’ve had so far which have been without fail encouraging. Here’s a round up of the most common issues that you’ve raised, and our answers (if we have any) for them:

• What’s going to make people put their desks up? This is undoubtedly one of the big unknowns : this is only going to work if we’ve got enough giving people with desks. We don’t have a solid business argument for it either : let’s be honest, there’s not much of an upside to it, apart from the warm glowing feeling you get from helping someone out, and the chance to meet a new person. And I think that’s what we’ll be focussing on : the feel good factor; sharing because it’s nice thing to do; the sociable element. It’s going to be a challenge for us when we create the brand and set the tone on the site. It has to feel supportive, collaborative (we’ve started well in this respect), and people will need to feel as if they belong to a community with a shared ethos of giving, sharing and not expecting much back in return. [Rob, I've just rambled in a pretty illiterate fashion as you'd expect from a developer : you're a words man - can you say this any more succinctly?]So far the straw poll highlights this challenge : there are far fewer people saying they’d offer their desks than would want to use them. But there are people saying they’d offer desks, and I think we probably do need a lot more people who might use the service than there are desks, so perhaps this split is about right.
• I don’t want to share my office with an axe murderer Yup, as has been suggested by lots of you, one of the first things we’re putting in is a rating system : people who use the desks can rate the desks, people who share their desks can rate their users. Frequent users get great ratings and nice things said about them. Of course at the beginning that’s no help, so then it’s down to sensible precautions. We’ll probably have an information section on the site, setting these out, but they’ll say something like:
  • If you don’t know the person, make sure you speak on the phone before they come in
  • Ask for references if you want [ultimately the reviews of desk users will end up being references, perhaps we should put a 'happy to be contacted as a reference' flag in when they make a review?]
  • Don’t leave people you don’t know in the office on their own
  • Avoid giving people key codes to doors

  The only real security risk that sharing your desk introduces is the stranger in your office.  With most open offices these days, that stranger is going to be surrounded by trusted employees : it’s going to be very difficult for them to get up to any mischief and there are much easier ways of stealing stuff / murdering people than this.

  Open minded employees of larger firms are probably going to find it difficult to get it past the jobsworth facilities manager.  This is something we recognise and we really see this app being embraced by small business offices rather than big firms.  Of course if Google want to get on board, I’ll be the first one trying our their spare desks!

Marcus also pointed out that there might be an environmental angle to exploit.  I’m with you Marcus, it feels like there should be… I’m just not sure what it is yet!