

Offbeat Guides Public Beta: On-Demand, Personalized Travel Books - dsifry
http://www.offbeatguides.com/
My new company just went live to public beta today - Offbeat Guides. After months of effort, over 6,000 private beta testers' feedback, and hundreds of bugs quashed. we just went live.<p>What's the big idea? On-demand, personalized travel books, for over 30,000 cities around the world. All the details are here: http://www.sifry.com/alerts/archives/2008/11/offbeat_guides_public_beta.html<p>Would love to get your thoughts and feedback!
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jamess
A great idea poorly implemented. Most of the info seems to be cadged without
attribution from wikitravel, often with the formatting poorly stripped.

I'd really love to be able to create a guide tailored to my interests, but
this isn't anywhere near it. The best thing they could do right now is discard
the whole database and start small, with one city at a time done in extreme
detail. Know how to get from any point A to point B in a city at any time of
the day, by every means and keep that info up to date. List every possible
tourist attraction, categorise them and keep that list up to date too. Get
more detail on local events. Contract a local contact on a piecework basis to
help maintain the city guide and add to it as appropriate. If this is too
expensive, do one city and seek funding based on that demo.

As it stands, the guides offered give far less value than an off the shelf
travel guide.

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dsifry
Thanks for the feedback - we're learning a lot and all feedback and commentary
is valuable and useful, so thanks for your comments! We have a team of editors
and curators, but obviously we can't cover every place at launch, so we work
hard to cover the long tail of destinations algorithmically. What city did you
try to build? I will have out content team have a deeper look into it to fix
it up.

Regarding attribution, we do use information from sites like Wikitravel and
Wikipedia, and there's a References chapter in every book - you can find it,
along with the URLs that we used to pull together your book in that section.

Your points are excellent ones, thanks for the feedback! This is just the
initial release of the beta to the public, and getting feedback, criticism and
suggestions like yours is VERY valuable. Thanks again!!!

Dave

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jamess
I tried a number of cities, your own home of San Francisco, my own of
Cambridge, UK as well as some others I'm familiar with like Bangalore and
Tapei. I was very disappointed that the San Francisco guide was of far worse
quality than the Cambridge guide for example. I would have expected since the
company is there, you might have something interesting to say about the city.
Apparently not.

The list of events is worse than useless, it's cheap and tacky. For example,
the events for Bangalore lists events in places such as Shanghai and somewhere
on the Indian coast over 500Km away, as well as events tourists couldn't
possibly be interested in such as agricultural machinery expos. You just can't
do this sort of thing by pulling events unfiltered from external sources, that
just doesn't work. Full stop. I want a sensible listing of events that I can
filter by my interests, each one with a map of the location and public
transport details.

The issues you have can't be fixed with copy editing. You simply can't produce
a guide to a place you've never been, and you really shouldn't try. This talk
about covering a "long tail" of destinations depresses me. Leave that stuff to
wikitravel, you should be producing a polished commercial product. At a
minimum you need to at least have had one person representing the company
visiting each place you produce a guide to. You aren't in the business
producing a general purpose guide, you're in the business of knowing
everything there is to know about a city and giving people a decent interface
to filtering it. Quite frankly, I don't see how you can do that without a team
of people going to a place for at least a month.

Some features I'd pay for:

* Suggested itineraries for days, based on a database of places and activities filtered by my interests and biased by predicted weather.

* Some sort of more/less detail slider for each page enabling me to customise the text.

* Complete and up to date public transport listings for the destination, cross referenced with the events and places I've chosen to add to my guide.

Above all, if I'm paying for something that costs about the same as the rough
guide I want something at least as good quality as the rough guide. You aren't
going to get that with wikitravel and creative commons photos.

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dsifry
Great feedback, you make some very good points. This is, after all, what a
beta is all about - to get out there, learn as much as we can, and iterate
iterate iterate.

Thanks for being brutally honest, this is just what we want to learn!

Dave

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jacobscott
Nothing on the front page of the website says beta. It's only when I get to
the step of my book being created that I have multiple timeouts and I need to
refresh multiple times. In fact, the page even has in bold:

"We're having some occasional time-outs; until we crack that, if the
information takes longer than a minute or two to come up, just refresh this
page."

I think this is poor user experience, and not having the site clearly marked
as beta may give users undue expectations. Not trying to be too harsh, but I
have spent five minutes and haven't seen even the TOC of my personalized
travel guide.

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dsifry
Good point. We actually had the _beta_ label in there, but somehow it got
dropped out when we did our final QA. We'll get it back in there.

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ojbyrne
My initial complaint is that its kind of expensive. Travel books at my local
bookstore (that I can buy the day before I travel) generally cost less than
$20.

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dsifry
Blog post announcing the public beta, along with a whole raft of informationa
bout what it is all about is here:

[http://www.sifry.com/alerts/archives/2008/11/offbeat_guides_...](http://www.sifry.com/alerts/archives/2008/11/offbeat_guides_public_beta.html)

