Yard Sale Treasure Map

I have just uploaded the Yard Sale Treasure Map Android App (v1.2) to the Android market. This has been a rocky start since I do not yet own an Android, which makes it extremely difficult to properly test the thing. My apologies if you downloaded the app earlier this week (v1.0 or v1.1), because I’m pretty sure that it didn’t work for you. I am sort of kind of maybe a little bit confident that my latest fixes will let folks see the sales.

If you do experience problems, please drop me a note below or by email. Otherwise I may not know that a problem exists!

A few months ago I released a mobile web page version of YSTM that you would be re-directed to if you use a mobile device to access this site.  To my surprise, very few people are taking advantage of this feature! This mobile web page is everything that the YSTM iPhone app is, but you do not need to download anything and it can be accessed from other non-Apple devices (like Android, Palm, Windows Mobile, etc).  If you have a modern smart phone, YSTM will even take advantage of your phone’s GPS capabilities.  See the comparison below of the iPhone app versus the YSTM mobile web page:

iPhone App	Mobile Web Site

Maybe there are not as many iPhone and Androids out there as I thought.  But if you or someone you know has a fancy mobile phone (iPhone, Android, or otherwise), take it with you on Saturday morning!  Take a peak every so often at the map.  When you find a nearby sale that meets your fancy, you can get instant directions to that sale.  Call this ad-hoc yardsaling!

Additionally, most people jump on to YSTM and create their map on Friday.  This is a great time to do your planning, but I can tell you that my yard sale database jumps another 25% in size during the wee hours of Friday evening and Saturday morning.  For this reason I worry that many of you are missing out on some great yard sales from those procrastinating yard sale hosts!  If you have your mobile phone with you on Saturday you may still catch these late breaking yard sales without missing out!

Despite most of the country being in yard sale hibernation, I have been hard at work on the site.

I have finally posted a feature that will let you advertise your sale directly on YSTM.  Of course if you are posting your sales to craigslist, your sales will show up on YSTM anyway, but I have added sticky notes to the right of the map to highlight specific sales (and give those sales a different marker on the map to stand out better).  This idea stems directly from user comments to advertise their neighborhood sales and flea markets so thank you for your input!

I have also put together a basic mobile version of the YSTM.  When you open YSTM from your mobile device you should be automatically re-directed to this mobile version.  This page is much more friendly to small screens and lower bandwidth, however, presently no fancy features have been added.  It is simply a map with markers, but it will hopefully suffice as a tool to get you from sale to sale in real time.  I will be tweaking the mobile site from time to time to make it as friendly as possible across all mobile devices.

The mobile site has been tested successfully on iPhone and Android.  This may or may not work on Windows Mobile devices depending on what browser you are using.  Unfortunately, mobile Google maps do not work correctly on the Blackberry browser (I’m sure the Blackberry map app works great, but I’m talking about using the Blackberry internet browser to view Google Maps v3 API webpages which is optimized for mobile devices)… we will have to wait for Blackberry to update their browser or for Google to find a work around.

Up until this point users could add non-craigslist yard sales to their map using the “Add Location” search feature (which can also be used to map other useful stops like coffee or bathroom breaks).  This information would be exclusive to that user’s map.  Well, I have finally gotten around to making a nice update that I am pretty excited about.

Yesterday I added an “Add Sales” tab that will let users quickly and easily add any other yard sales from other sources, and (optionally) share the sale information with other YSTM users!  I’m hoping that this will save everyone time by reducing redundant effort.  If only one person in town adds the extra sale information while making her map, then every other YSTM user will be saved the time and effort.

The “Add Sales” tab is not intended to be used for advertising a sale; I would prefer that folks stick with craigslist for their advertising.  This feature will hopefully be used as a way to bring all of sale information together each week to speed up the route planning process.

As always, if something doesn’t work the way that it should, or if you think I left out some important feature that would make it easier to share sale information, just email or leave a comment and I will see what I can do.

One of the problems that I have struggled with while working on this site is the bad address issue.  There might be 195 different “105 Elm St.”s out there so which one do I map?

I am constantly working to improve the accuracy of my mappings, but there will always be a small percentage that just won’t be correct (for instance, “turn left at the 7-11 and follow the road to Maple Ave”).  To combat this problem I have introduced controls that allow you as the user to fix ads with incorrect information.  When one person finds and corrects an error, all will benefit.  This is something of a social experiment I suppose.  When a yard saler is planning a route and spots an excellent, but poorly mapped sale, they can correct the mapping (and thereby improve their own map) and be on their way.  The next yard saler will have access to the new and improved map, and all the while everyone is saving time and energy while still finding the best sales.

And in that vein, stage two of my social experiment will be to add the ability for yard salers to share the locations of yard sales through YSTM such that for each locality, this information need only be entered once.  Basically if you were adding blue markers before for non-craigslist yard sales and wished to share this information, other users would thereafter see your markers.  This feature is yet to come and still needs some design work.

Let me know what you think about the current and future updates, and as always, please let me know if something doesn’t work!

This week I have a short list of things to add/fix.

There were dozens of comments regarding the map advertisement blocking sale content.  I have moved the ad to the bottom of the screen.  Let me know if this does not solve your problem.

Someone made a great comment about having too many sales nearby and wanted a 2 mile radius option. This is easy so you should see this fix by next Friday.

I am still working on making the search feature work properly. Hopefully this will be done before next Friday.

I changed a few things around and now and the Show/Hide Unmappable Sales feature may not always work so I’d like to get this working properly too. For those of you who have not tried this feature, you can use this to scroll through your local sales that I could not find a date and/or address. I need a date so that I don’t send you to yesterday’s sale and I need a proper address to put a marker on the map. I don’t want anyone to miss a sale, so you have the option to scroll through these listings and add the sale to the map yourself.

Please keep the comments coming!

One feature that is painfully absent from any of these kind of mapping web pages is route optimization.  The map should tell you what the fastest route is rather than let you drive in circles and backtracking to hit the next sale.

This is actually a pretty difficult problem to implement.  Lots of math and fancy terms like “traveling salesman”, “np hard” and “ant colonies”.  College math students do research projects to figure this out.  Fortunately for you, the folks at Optimap have agreed to let YSTM use their optimization magic to make your life easier!

I have added an “Optimize Route” button on Step 2 of YSTM.  If you have less than 21 sales mapped you can select this button and your spaghetti route will miraculously transform itself into a efficient trail!

The vision for YSTM was to create a web application to improve on the tedious process of yard sale planning.  Paper maps, post-it notes, newspapers, and hours of research seems to be terribly inefficient, especially in larger urban areas where address locations are not completely obvious.

With the advancements in technologies it was obvious that a better way could be found.

Enter Yard Sale Treasure Map.  This website was created with the following simple goals in mind:

1. Automatically put local sales on a map
2. Allow the user to add other sales or stops (sales from newspapers, a stop for coffee, etc)
3. Provide the means for the yard-saler to plan and order the route
4. Let the yard-saler print a customized map