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.