

BirdsEye: Interview with Kenn Kaufman   - dnsworks
http://cs.birdersworld.com/brdcs/blogs/field_of_view/2009/12/02/birdseye-interview-with-kenn-kaufman.aspx

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mechanical_fish
Very good, they built the app that I dreamed up two years ago!

Maybe this will actually be good enough that I won't find myself wishing I had
time to write my own...

I do have my doubts about the dependency on eBird, though. Given that eBird =
Cornell Lab of Ornithology = the top birders in the USA, linking up with eBird
is obviously the right move from the branding standpoint, and the right move
from the I-don't-want-to-piss-off-the-establishment standpoint. But from the
user's standpoint? They claim that "participation in eBird has exploded in the
last two years". Either they vastly improved the eBird interface or birders
are a very stubborn and obsessive lot [1], because I looked at eBird a while
back and it had one of the worst interfaces I had ever seen. Like, corporate
internal Java application bad.

\---

[1] Which is to say: I'm not convinced they've improved the interface.

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carlcoryell
Carl here (one of the engineers who worked on birdseye),

The web interface to eBird isn't very usable, especially if you want to know
what birds are near by and where to go see particular birds. It is however the
best repository of bird observation data in North America and we are thrilled
to contribute to it.

This release just reads from the eBird database. Our next release will also
allow contributions to the database. This will make BirdsEye a great front end
for eBird. It's much easier to record observations in the field on a device
with GPS etc than to remember everything until you get home.

Right now, eBird is getting over 1 million observations per month and we're
hoping that BirdsEye will double or triple that.

~~~
mechanical_fish
This is great news. And I wouldn't be surprised if "double or triple" ends up
being an underestimate. ;)

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galliguez
I was just talking about an app idea like this with friends. Its just proves -
there _IS_ an app for everything!

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dnsworks
I'm pretty excited about this. Carl, one of their engineers is someone I've
been trying to poach for my own company for a long time. This is giving me a
good use for all of my telephoto lenses besides tech conferences!

