
Pizzashare - daveambrose
http://www.pizzashare.com/
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chaostheory
when I first saw the name I thought 'cool!'- I was thinking that this is a
site that poor college kids can use to get together and split the price of a
whole pizza or two (for more variety and meeting new ppl - along with a tool
showing what everyone owes for the pizzas including tip)... I was a bit
disappointed when this wasn't the case.

I may be missing something but I just don't see the point of this web app (as
a super focused yelp) when the yelps of world already have tons of data and
tons of users for this very thing

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catone
I've never liked sites that start the user off on a crowded country-wide
Google Maps view. It seems like such a clumsy way to display data. One, I
don't want or need to find every pizza place in the US, so why show it to me?
and 2. it's overwhelming and a pain in the ass to have to zoom into my
location.

Google Maps embeds are fine as a way to put things on a map for searches
inside a specific, narrowly defined location. But they're not so good as the
first thing you'd see.

I'd ditch the giant US map and redesign to put more emphasis on the zip/city
search box -- maybe get a fix on the user's location by IP and automatically
pop up popular pizza places nearby.

Also, a bug: I was able to share my favorite pizza place over and over again
... so really easy to game the system.

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ca
I gave this site a try and added pizza places that I like in Toronto, ON.

\- I was disappointed that I couldn't add any comments, notes or tags (you
could even display badges for top picks in categories like "cheap", "organic",
"fast", "high end" on your map). It would have been cool to link to the
boingboing.net article referencing Massimo pizza or to recommend my favorite
types of pizza at each place.

\- I had issues where the green marker pins would be placed in the wrong spot
if I: shared a restaurant, typed in the name of another restaurant, and
clicked OK. This happened twice (FF 3.0.6 on WinXP).

\- I like the look and feel design of the site but I partially agree with some
other posters here who ask what distinguishes your site from the mass market
players like yelp. Being pizza-only makes using your site really easy to use,
but I'm not sure if that's enough. My random brainstormed thought: Could you
make recommending and searching for great pizza places into a game that's fun
enough to pique the interest of a first time visitor?

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misterbwong
Took a quick look. Seems like this suffers from the chicken/egg social network
problem. The more users there are, the better the data/app will be. However,
users won't use the app until the data/app returns better results.

Example: I put in 92602 (Irvine in OC). Only two pizza stores popped up-both
chains (Little Caesars & Round Table) and both >8 mi from the middle of 92602.
As a user, this is an immediate turn off because the app isn't helping me find
great pizza places. It is only showing me pizza places that I know about-ones
that are far from me to boot. I know for a fact that there is a Round Table
Pizza that is much closer than the one mapped.

To combat this, you might want to load up some data programmatically so that
you have a baseline (scraping PizzaHut.com or Dominoes.com would be a start).
Users can then add to your base data set as well as vote up ("share") places
that already exist.

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tdavis
I thought the point was to share _favorite_ pizza places, don't chains just
add noise? If anybody's favorite pizza place is Pizza Hut or Dominoes, I feel
extremely sorry for them.

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misterbwong
I feel the same way, but users are already sharing chains as their favorites,
so I thought it would make for a better user experience. Since users are
already sharing these chains, the fact that these stores are being added
shouldn't signal their quality, the votes should.

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kin
I. Love. Pizza.

And I love mom and pop pizza shops and am against the chain onces. In that
sense, I really like the concept of this website but it doesn't deliver on
usability.

If I do a quick search in Los Angeles, only Mulberry St. Pizza pops us. If I
do it again, Pizzeria Mozza pops up. What is with the inconsistency? What do
all the colors mean? Why won't my added location pop up when I search for it?
Once all these bugs are fixed and there is a larger user base then all the
pizza lovers of the world would think your website is awesome. It is different
from Yelp and I like that because it is not cluttered. In any case, I would
say to continue working on it and in the end it will pay off somewhat.

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jasonkester
Hmm. I thought everybody got this out of their system in 2005. You know,
Google Maps API comes out and everybody writes that little test application
where you can put pins in the map and store locations in a database. Dozens of
sites that look exactly like this this went live over a 3 week period. Some of
them inexplicably even got funded.

But it's 2009 now. It's a bit hard to get excited about this.

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mjmueller
Thanks for the insight guys, this has only been up for two weeks and I really
appreciate the feedback. There are definitely some bugs on here and you are
right about me taking off those pizza chains(dominos, pizza hut etc...) I want
to incorporate a lot of these suggestions into the beta version which should
be coming out in a month or two, but it will be more a less a total makeover.

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smanek
I can't seem to get it to add either of my favorite pizza places in Cambridge,
MA 01238 ('Cambridge 1' and 'The Upper Crust'). Am I doing something wrong?

Their URLs are <http://cambridge1.us/> and
<http://www.theuppercrustpizzeria.com/>

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vaksel
Not really a fan of the popup for the zipcode. Maybe do a geolocate for the ip
and match that way

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planck
Interesting concept. I wonder: are the circle sizes proportional to the total
number of shares country-wide, or are they proportional to the number of
shares within some shorter distance?

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aston
There seems to be an escaping issue. Around the SF Bay Area, there's a pizza
place called "Mary's Pizza Shack" that on mouse hover only says "Mary."

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staunch
So get into their machine via SQL injection and fix the code. Jeez! This Web
2.0 where users are expected to contribute!

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AlfaWolph
Wow. Talk about a really, really, long tail here.

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jrockway
What does this do that Yelp doesn't?

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mjgoins
Grimaldi's is for tourists.

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ShardPhoenix
Why US only?

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jollyjerry
dig the color scheme and look.

