My new company just went live to public beta today - Offbeat Guides. After months of effort, over 6,000 private beta testers' feedback, and hundreds of bugs quashed. we just went live.<p>What's the big idea? On-demand, personalized travel books, for over 30,000 cities around the world. All the details are here: http://www.sifry.com/alerts/archives/2008/11/offbeat_guides_public_beta.html<p>Would love to get your thoughts and feedback!
A great idea poorly implemented. Most of the info seems to be cadged without attribution from wikitravel, often with the formatting poorly stripped.<p>I'd really love to be able to create a guide tailored to my interests, but this isn't anywhere near it. The best thing they could do right now is discard the whole database and start small, with one city at a time done in extreme detail. Know how to get from any point A to point B in a city at any time of the day, by every means and keep that info up to date. List every possible tourist attraction, categorise them and keep that list up to date too. Get more detail on local events. Contract a local contact on a piecework basis to help maintain the city guide and add to it as appropriate. If this is too expensive, do one city and seek funding based on that demo.<p>As it stands, the guides offered give far less value than an off the shelf travel guide.
Nothing on the front page of the website says beta. It's only when I get to the step of my book being created that I have multiple timeouts and I need to refresh multiple times. In fact, the page even has in bold:<p>"We're having some occasional time-outs; until we crack that, if the information takes longer than a minute or two to come up, just refresh this page."<p>I think this is poor user experience, and not having the site clearly marked as beta may give users undue expectations. Not trying to be too harsh, but I have spent five minutes and haven't seen even the TOC of my personalized travel guide.
My initial complaint is that its kind of expensive. Travel books at my local bookstore (that I can buy the day before I travel) generally cost less than $20.
Blog post announcing the public beta, along with a whole raft of informationa bout what it is all about is here:<p><a href="http://www.sifry.com/alerts/archives/2008/11/offbeat_guides_public_beta.html" rel="nofollow">http://www.sifry.com/alerts/archives/2008/11/offbeat_guides_...</a>