Flaming Desks is a blog…

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!

Prompted by a techcrunch article this morning, I’ve done a bit of research into methods of importing addresses from users’ Gmail, Hotmail and Yahoo accounts.  We’re interested in doing this at some point because we want people to tell their friends and colleagues about the desk they’ve just posted.

Gmail has the Contacts Data API, Microsoft has Windows Live Contacts API for Windows Live accounts (Hotmail), and the Yahoo Address Book API.

It also looks as if there is an API coming for LinkedIn (which is appropriate for us since we’re in the business world) but I can’t seem to find it anywhere. I remember seeing an app that offered to import contacts from LinkedIn, so it must be possible - can anyone help with this?

It’s all phase [insert number > than 2] anyway but I thought I’d document it here for reference.

Coworking wiki map thing

I got an email from Robin over at the brand new and shiny “help with social media stuff” agency We Are Social, pointing me in the direction of the Coworking wiki.

As Robin pointed out, Flaming Desks operates in a very similar arena.  See, what the clever people who set up Coworking do is encourage and educate people to set up kind of collective cafe office spaces.  So, you go along, and post a notice saying you’re looking for coworkers in your area, then when you’ve got enough people you set up a flexible cafe-stylee office and everyone chips-in for the rent - plus, you make other desks available on hourly, daily, weekly, and/or monthly rates (up to the individual organiser).

There are some good examples.  And they’ve got a cool map thing which I don’t fully understand, but am sure I would if I was involved.

Flaming desks is different, in that we’re giving people the opportunity to list desks that they’re temporarily not using, and offer them to others for free, as a way of meeting good/nice people.

The internet is a big place where we can all live happily together, so I’ve bunged our URL on their wiki (they had a “Similar stuff” page), and linked to them in our sidebar for our visitors who may be looking for longer term desk-usage-action.

Below, is a hand picked selection of the initial logos I’ve had a bash at.

More focussed on form and style rather than colours at the moment, it would be great to hear everyone’s thoughts before taking it any further.

The typeface itself probably needs more exploration, however I do really like the main one I’ve used and think it works nicely with the adapted ‘M’.

Hopefully these initial ideas will spark off some more chat about where to take it from here.

(For reference, my favourite design so far is the top left logo on page 4) I think that the more stylized flames work best when seen small on the screen and as page 3 illustrates, they work nicely as a stand alone image too.

Our regular reader(s) will know about Nick’s promotional masterplan. i.e. burn a desk.

However, while this is a fun stunt - and one which we hope people will want to come along to (we’ll keep you posted) - recent research shows there are limits as to how far we should take it:

Students in Philadelphia did not appreciate someone who burnt a desk on the top of a building and pushed it off!

Good job Nick’s all over the safety aspect, then.

[Guys: was actually seeing how we're doing SEO-wise. Early days but looking good.]