Anonymous Hex

jeff smith's blog
in

How Long is the Long Tail?

Fed up with the (un)reliability of Chicago’s rail transit system (the “El”), we’ve kicked around the idea of a crowd-sourced train tracking system for a while. Well, one of our fearless Consultants took on the task and created Where The El. The app is a neat combination of Google Maps and twitter. The time frames, which increased exponentially with each step, were amazing. Some real data:

 

  • Time spent talking about how great an El-tracking system would be: about 2 years
  • Time required to develop said El-tracking system: about 2 days(!)
  • Number of people marketing the system: 2 (who each sent one e-mail to about 10 people)
  • Time To First “Real” User (TTFRU; does Google Analytics track that?): about 2 minutes
  • Time To First Media Inquiry(TTFMI): about 2 hours

 

Posted: Jul 25 2008, 09:27 AM by jdsmith | with 3 comment(s)

Comments

Andy Amiri said:

Very cool! Great concept, and an awesome solution to an annoying problem. I just had a few problems with the interface. It keeps "refreshing" in Firefox - maybe some of Clarity's excellent Silverlight design-elopers (combination of designer and developer ;) could take a look at the UX.

# July 25, 2008 11:34 AM

sholstad said:

Sadly, the Google Maps API used for this doens't support live inside an AJAX update panel... hence the annoying full page refresh to show train movement.  Plans are in the works to convert/enhance this app to SL, although we probably will lose the nice side benefits of gmaps.

# July 25, 2008 12:23 PM

Patrick Handel said:

Very cool, Steve. San Francisco needs one of these ... if someone hasn't put up something similar in the last 9 hours. Out of curiosity, for a company that makes most of its hay off custom Microsoft solutions, why did you choose the Google Maps API instead of LiveEarth?  Again, good stuff here.

# July 25, 2008 3:26 PM
Leave a Comment

(required) 

(required) 

(optional)

(required)