Highgroove featured on the Ruby on Rails Podcast

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We recently sat down with Geoffrey Grosenbach for the Ruby on Rails Podcast and talked about Scout, PlaceShout, working as a remote team, and balancing client work with internal projects.

Listen to the Podcast

See PlaceShout, Other New Apps at SF Beta Tonight

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Andre and I will be at SF Beta tonight demoing PlaceShout, our short-form local reviews service.

We’re among 10 companies showing off their latest innovations (view the full list).

More information on tonight’s event is here.

Hope to see you there!

Making local reviews meaningful

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One issue we face with PlaceShout, our short-form local reviews site, is that many of the shoutouts may not be relevant to you. If you haven’t been to Nihon in San Francisco, you can’t agree or disagree with Natasha’s shoutout: “Swanky whiskey bar/restaurant. Food was good-small plate Japanese and sushi”.

We recently implemented “Shoutouts You Might Be Interested” functionality to make it more relevant.

Nightly, we scan our database looking for places you’ve been. We find any shoutouts created at those places. These shoutouts are displayed on your personalized homepage, and you can quickly agree, disagree, or pass on each of the shoutouts. There’s a great chance you’ll have an opinion on these places since you’ve already voiced your thoughts on each of them in the past.

Once per week, we email 3 of these shoutouts to you. Directly from the email, you can agree, disagree, or pass:

So far, it’s been very successful. 38% of users have voted on a shoutout from an email. This increased the number of votes on shoutouts by 27% (real-time voting from Scout):

It’s had a great impact for 2 reasons—it keeps our users informed of activity at places they’ve been and it makes browsing and searching PlaceShout better. The most accurate (and least accurate) shoutouts now have significantly more votes.

Introducing PlaceShout

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We’ve just launched PlaceShout (http://placeshout.com) – a “cheatsheet”-style summary of places around town, created by you and arbitrated by the community. Now you can see what’s important about a place without wading though stories about someone’s neighbor’s dog.

If you have ever been anywhere, you’ll enjoy making shoutouts. You’re limited to 100 characters, so save the long-winded narratives for someplace else.

You are probably thinking that PlaceShout’s signup process is a long, arduous process. Let me be the first to assure you that it is not. If you have one of those new-fangled OpenIDs, you can sign right in. Because we’re web 2.0 like that.

The easy doesn’t stop there. To make a shoutout, just type it in along with and the name of the place:

Confirm the place:

Like magic, the shoutout appears:

People are shouting out places in small towns and big cities…

• According to Megan, Welsh’s Pizza of Pender, NE (pop. 1,145) is the “Best place in the tri-county for pizza!”
• Jim Benson is living the big city life in Seattle, WA (pop. 3,263,497), and spreading the news that Cafe Besalu’s “Ginger biscuits will make you happy”.

Where are most of the shouters? Right now Ann Arbor, Michigan is in first place. You can see all the cities and add your city here.

Like maps? We have a map. And it has nifty directional arrows:

Try it out now: http://placeshout.com