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Comment by yannis | Hacker News Reader

Nice idea. However, staring on the emptiness of a map when you enter, is not such a good idea though. Suggestions:

   - use geolocation to get visitors id and show a map that 
     is  closer to his area.
   - if there are no ads in that region town etc, show a prompt or 
     two to entice the visitor to do something. Use some mock-ads in
     the side margins rather than just *place an ad to promote your 
     location or service to your local customers*

Can you post a sample of an area where their 100's of ads to see how would that appeal visually?

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Thanks for the thoughtful feedback. This link is loaded with about 37K listings scraped from recovery.org.

http://beta.townflier.com:8000/

Thanks I saw the recovery.org under the categories but couldn't see anything as I was staring over a map of JHB.

Some more questions:)

  - How would you handle spam? 
  - How long would an ad stay?
  - Would users not be worry of revealing their location? 
    (for security reasons?)
  - How would a 70yr old lady from Peoria use the service
    to find a roommate?

Some other suggestions:

  - If you notice in South Africa the farmers if they are 
    interested in an ad, they will tear a small piece of
    paper from the bottom of the ad. Drag and drop?
  - Give an alternative view to the textbox at left, if there
    are too many ads. Let them read like classifieds ie some
    additional styling.

Overall I think is a great idea

The recovery.org data is all US based. Search on Kansas for example.

- Each posting has a spam link on it, if you click it the posting will disappear for you. Once enough different people click it the posting is deleted.

- Currently postings don't expire but are displayed time decayed. i.e. most recent first. Hopefully we can get enough traffic to where we have to address this :-)

- You don't have to enter your full address when you post. You can enter your town and the posting will be placed in the center of the town. You decide how much locational information to give out

- We need to get over the chicken and egg problem of enough postings first

Thanks for all the feedback!

We need to get over the chicken and egg problem of enough postings first

Suggestion use the ebay API to populate (it can also bring some affiliate income).

Any thought for exposing your API. I think this can be a great application to foster micro-communities.

Thanks for the ebay pointer I will look at it. I know scraping craigslist is not the way to go :-)

Yes, we have discussed allowing private or subscription townfliers for micro-communities. That might be the next step.

At first I assumed the spam link indicated that the entry had been identified as spam or had been posted by someone calling themselves "spam". Might want that to be clearer, e.g. "mark as spam". Or just change to hide and do some smart filtering.

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