2008

by irenet - December 31, 2008

Looking back, it’s been a busy and exciting year at 11870.com. Though we’ve kept you posted through newsletters and this blog, it’s a good time to summarize a few of this year’s highlights…

2008 was the year we turned 1, our first anniversary! We held a party to celebrate the beginning of our second year in action, which we can now say was marked by a progression that led to the end of our beta phase.

The new iteration in March was only the beginning: 2008 saw the release of a lighter mobile-friendly version of 11870.com and the possibility of text-messaging a service to a cell phone from the site. Extended map features enhanced by Street View and pictures of the location were only the beginning of the geographical development of the site: the way you explore a city on 11870.com has changed substantially this year. We owe most of the inspiration for these changes to the feedback of users, by e-mail, twitter, blog comments… and visits! We’ve even interviewed some of our most singular inhabitants to bring you all a little closer, and satisfy our own curiosity.

Thanks to user’s recommendations we were able to pinpoint the 500 most popular places in Madrid and award them a distinction which they proudly display. Our enthusiasm was matched by the press, this year we’ve been featured in newspapers and even on TV a couple of times. We have quite a set of press clippings to prove it. Other places we were delighted to see 11870.com features were Prototype‘s homepage and Firefox.

And speaking of media, in addition to the pictures and videos added by users, now you can view over 1.000 restaurant menus and include youtube and vimeo videos in the page for a service.

Over and over this year we’ve been surprised by great ideas in the form of mashups, some of them award winning, that find new uses for all this information. Our API is being used in projects across the net and with tools like Android and Search Monkey.

So that’s it, but not all, for 2008. There’s so much more we’d like to tell you about, like all the cool things we have in store for 2009. But most of all, we want to thank all of the people that have accompanied us this year and helped us grow and improve day by day. Happy New Year!

categories: general

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One, two, three.. add a widget to your site

by irenet - December 29, 2008

Introducing the 11870.com search widget, available here for anyone with a blog or a website that might benefit from featuring some 11870.com search results. Customize it, preview it and copy the code. It’s easy as pie, and a lot less fattening.

By the way, you can pick up any sort of RSS feed from 11870.com and add it to your site. There’s even a script you can use to create a linkroll on your sidebar, read more about it here.

categories: tips & tricks

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Seasonal flair

by irenet - December 24, 2008

In the days following the release of our new main page, many 11870.com inhabitants have complimented us on the seasonal robot theme designed for the footer. Esther, who’s behind many of the little bits of flair that make the site special, has adapted the robots into a set of desktop backgrounds.

They come in several colors and two arrangements… for you to pick and choose the one that fits your mood. Here’s the link. Happy holidays!

categories: just for fun

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nobody wants to be just a beta

by irenet - December 18, 2008

After a year and ten months live, 11870.com has grown. We no longer feel beta.

What best reflects this feeling is the new start page that we’re premiering today. We could say our users built it. Everything you see there: the types of services available, the cities, pictures, video, latest activity, etc… is what the users consider relevant. Also – and because it’s something we never take our eyes off of– it’s the result of analyzing statistics, reading (e-mails, twitter, blogs) and regularly meeting with users to look at what they need and what the best way to do it is.

The start page isn’t the only thing that’s changed. Lately we’ve been incorporating many things worth mentioning, here’s a brief summary of them:

• content categorization: through clustering, we’ve obtained a classification in the form of categories that reflects the heterogeneity of 11870.com contents. To name a few, we’ve emphasized hotels, rural housing, restaurants, leisure and culture, bookstores, painters, general reforms, movers, plumbers… We’ve also improved the search experience and access to this information, including many types of facets whenever possible.

• new browsing by cities: “the best services in your area”. Exploring an area has a lot more logic and sense to it. We’ve put contents first. When you access a city, Barcelona for instance, the first things you’ll see are the most important places and services for users. We’ve also added new filters, visualizations, maps, etc.. Right now, there are nearly 4000 cities in 105 countries with listed content.

• new restaurant menus: We’ve added thousands of restaurant menus, so that you can see the prices, dishes and meals options of many restaurants in Madrid, Barcelona and Seville without leaving the house.
• new services and third party integration: Now you can reserve a table at many restaurants, book a room in thousands of hotels, or scan the best in rural housing thanks to agreements with El Tenedor, Booking and Top Rural. We have other agreements on the way, which we’ll announce in due time.

We hope these changes are to your liking. And we’d love to know what you think about them.

And last, we’ve created something that has been requested many times: a forum. We hope it will become a meeting point for all of those that use and visit the site and want to discuss and share ideas regarding different aspects of 11870.com.

categories: new!

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archipelagos

by irenet - December 12, 2008

They say no man (or woman) is an island… but we know plenty of people inhabit them. Users in Spain‘s Canary and Balearic islands had pointed out that our geographic structure (country > province > locality)  did not suit the reality of their situation, since a province in these areas can span several islands. So, in order to make geographical browsing on 11870.com more useful for them, we’ve given each island in the archipelagos the same status as a province here.

Now you can explore each island individually, and the pull down menus to the left of the region will offer only municipalities located on the island you’re looking at. You can also follow activity for your island(s) of choice: Tenerife, Ibiza, Gran Canaria, Majorca… just click on the star!

Above, from the page for Ibiza: pull down menus help you narrow down or expand the area you’re looking at.

categories: features

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More video, anyone?

by irenet - December 9, 2008

We’ve recently incorporated the option of adding videos from Vimeo and YouTube to the page for a service on 11870.com.

Above,  ie School of Architecture added a video of Laban Centre from YouTube.

To add a video you need to be at the page where you edit the details for a saved place. Scroll down to add pictures and videos. Click on add videos from vimeo or youtube, then just paste the address for the video into dialog box that comes up.

You can read more about pictures and videos on 11870.com here.

categories: features

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