Platial Goes Local & Very Soon Mobile

platial's new map

Platial, the community mapping portal, has been redesigned to highlight their content. In making the decision to redesign the team realized two things. First, that with all of their content (over 150MM points from their community maps and the recently acquired FrapprRadar post) they had the makings for map-oriented local guides. Secondly, the vast majority (>98%) of their traffic comes from browsers, people who don’t contribute to the site, so why not make sure they can find what they need?

Their announcement post does a a great job of detailing their new features, but i will go through some of the new portions that I find particularly striking.

All Map – The new Platial is all about the MAP. When you load the page it’s completely filled with the area of your interest and their are small command windows hanging off of it. And of course you can still get to the content sources.

Search Results – Continuing the all-map trend, search results are displayed on the map. You are also given a list view in one of the command windows.

Slideshow – After running your search you can hit play on the map and in a Twittervision-style it will show you all of your search results. It’s great to see the slideshow feature gaining more traction, hopefully Platial will enable a real-time edit viewer like Google did (Radar post).

platialicons

Iconic Filters – At the top of the map there are now a series of icons that denote the most common searches (based on user tags and actions). Just click one to search for that on your map. Di-Ann Eisner, Platial CEO, explained more in an email to me, “What makes local content interesting? Well, definitely food/drink, shopping and standard city guide stuff BUT based on watching our users for 2 years we also saw that it was local history, parks, architecture, green, activism, punk, kid-friendly and more- so that’s how we’ve categorized and are building out our content. ”

This redesign sets up Platial for a mobile play. Having a local guide on my phone that come complete with iconic search that displays the results on a map of my current area will be very handy. Platial is not keeping their mobile ambitions a secret and the mobile apps will be coming.

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