Hello Mapsters,
This email to keep you updated with with our brand new social content curator: Map It Out!
The bêta release was positively welcomed by the audience, with a bit less than 1000 unique visitors in the first days.
We also made a few maps to give you hands-on examples of the uses of Map It Out! :
- Putin’s Reelection
- iPad 3 Release
- Our first Friday Playlist Map
- Sean Parker & Al Gore Keynote @ SxSW
We also had a very detailed French article in Surfandbiz.com. It’s like a tutorial so take five minutes to read it!
Many of you gave us feedback, and we thank you a million for that. It’s compulsory for us to know what you liked or not, and what you need or would like to have, so that we improve the interface as much as we can. Here are the first findings we made.
To Zoom or not to Zoom?
Zoom is the major problem you seemed to encounter while using Map It Out!.
Some of you didn’t understand that you could zoom to change the display of the maps, and thus be able to read the tweets.
There are 3 ways to zoom :
- Use your mouse scroller
- Use your pad scroller
- Use two fingers and scroll up and down (for Mac users and some other devices)
- In the “Read mode”, you can also double click on the map like in Google Maps.
We will include a clickable Zoom Pad in the next version of Map It Out! to solve this issue.
Chrome, Firefox, or… IE?!
Map It Out! is optimized for Chrome. We didn’t choose Chrome, Chrome chose us! Google’s V8 JavaScript Engine and Webkit convinced us that Chrome is currently the best mainstream browser for developpers. So if you want the best experience on Map It Out! you know what to do…
Of course, we are also optimized for Firefox 3.5 and more. Still, we recommend you download the latest 10.0.2 Version
Finally, if you are an Internet Explorer (really?! 
) user, ensure to use the latest version, but we don’t guarantee the genuine Map It Out! experience on this browser, at least for now…
The Crash, Paris Calling
Parental Advisory, Techy Content..!
The Application Error issues you may have noticed were due to one of our request’s response time, which was blocking other requests on the server.
The most consuming request is the “save request” sent to the client when it synchronizes data.
The good news was that we knew it was the most critical point of our architecture, the bad news was we didn’t plan that database growth would impact the response time.
On the New Map Interface, when Twitter searches have a large number of responses, the client wants to save all the tweets on the server for later reading. The number of tweets on the server is around 20 000, and each new tweet from the client was validated as unique before processing. This validation was time consuming, and depends on the database size. Thus, this requests was more and more time consuming day after day.
We changed the architecture design of the save request, thanks to this the validation is no longer a problem… And we also added new profiling tests to ensure the long-term sustainability of this specific issue.
All apologizes for this, we hope it didn’t bother you too much…
Tips to search Twitter
Here are a few tips to help you search Twitter. A reminder for some of you, and maybe something new for the others… I didn’t know we could look for happy hours in Paris that easily…! 
- Operator : Finds tweets…
- twitter search containing both “twitter” and “search”. This is the default operator.
- “happy hour” : containing the exact phrase “happy hour”.
- love OR hate : containing either “love” or “hate” (or both).
- beer -root : containing “beer” but not “root”.
- #haiku : containing the hashtag “haiku”.
- from:alexiskold : sent from person “alexiskold”.
- to:techcrunch : sent to person “techcrunch”.
- @mashable : referencing person “mashable”.
- “happy hour”near:”san francisco” : containing the exact phrase “happy hour” and sent near “san francisco”.
- near:NYC within:15mi : sent within 15 miles of “NYC”.
- superhero since:2010-12-27 : containing “superhero” and sent since date “2010-12-27″ (year-month-day).
- ftw until:2010-12-27 : containing “ftw” and sent up to date “2010-12-27″.
- movie -scary : containing “movie”, but not “scary”, and with a positive attitude.
- flight
: containing “flight” and with a negative attitude. - traffic ? : containing “traffic” and asking a question.
- hilarious filter:links : containing “hilarious” and linking to URLs.
- newssource:twitterfeed : containing “news” and entered via TwitterFeed
Thanks again for supporting us, and don’t forget you can contact us to tell your opinion about Map It Out!
