More comment feeds

As promised we are continuing to roll out rss integration across our site. The latest feature are review feeds on user profile pages (example). Have friends that use Boston Squares? Sign up for their feed to keep up with their activity. Or you can share your feed with friends so they know what you are up to. Enjoy!

New comment feeds

We have another medium sized feature to announce that might be of interest to some. Over the coming weeks we plan to roll out RSS integration across Boston Squares so users can stay up to date with square activity without visiting our site. Today we are rolling out the first feed type: comment feeds.

Now, whenever you browse to a business detail page (example) you will see a link to "Subscribe to comments". Opening this up in your feed reader will allow you to stay in touch with what people are saying about a particular business. This might be useful if you are the business owner or are otherwise interested in what people are saying.

We are starting to explore where else to employ feeds on the site. Here are some ideas that are already in the pipeline:

• Feeds of businesses flagged "needs work"
• Feeds of recently updated businesses
  

That's all for now. Please let us know if you have any other ideas.

Also, if you are not familiar with rss, here is a good summary.

New week, new features

Just a couple very small features to announce today. Some of you might remember the old version of Boston Squares before we redesigned in 2006. That site had a host of problems and scalability issues, but it also had a fair number of features that we would like to bring back at some point. Today we brought back a tiny feature that can make browsing the squares quite a bit more convenient. Now you will notice that our square pages (see davis square for example) have business counts next to the category names. Small change, but helpful...

While we were working on it we also optimized the page some to help make it nice any snappy. Enjoy!

Google maps integration started

This was a long time coming... We've wanted to integrate Google maps with Boston Squares since they released there API but for whatever reason we never got around to it. Today we took a small step in the right direction. Now if you view details on any business in our directory, you should see a small map above the address (see Redbones). If you don't see a map for a particular business, it's probably because we don't know their address. Of course anyone can edit Boston Squares, so feel free to help out by adding it yourself!

Now, obviously, this is just a small step, but we have a lot more in the works, so please stay tuned. The next milestone will be to add maps of the squares to the square pages so you will be able to see all of the businesses on the same map.

Welcome to our blog

Welcome to the Boston Squares blog. After quite a long time without one, we've decided to create a blog. Why blog? We are hoping to get a couple of things out of it...

First of all, we want to be more in touch with our users. The blog will help us explore new ideas and get feedback faster. There are a lot of features we want to implement over the coming months and we are hoping that the community will help us prioritize that some.

The second big reason is to help us call attention to new features. Currently when we release something new, we have no good way of alerting our users. If you feel like staying in the loop, pay attention to this blog!

That's all for now. We hope to be posting some exciting new stuff in the near future.