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Comment by kehunt | Hacker News Reader

Having spent a year trying to compete with Craigslist (albeit entirely on my own), I can say it's a damn hard market to break into. You're competing with free. Your market by definition scrimping on money. You're competing against a very well-known brand name.

I'd love it if my little hobby project (http://dibs.net) managed to take off, even a little bit. It'd be dead-simple to write apps against the API. I'd encourage it! IMHO, Dibs is what CL would be if it weren't built a decade ago.

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I like your site. Perhaps we can both incorporate some ides together and come up with a master plan. Our site is www.AddAnything.com and we are doing lots of marketing to get it to a satisfiable level of success. Let me know your thoughts. thanks Mike

one problem right off the bat with dibs.net is that, as with seemingly 100% of US-based sites relying on geo-location information, it fails horribly outside of the (US-based) developer's market: I'm currently in Lucerne, central Switzerland, yet it put me in Emmen, a sleepy suburb north of Lucerne.

Edit: A quick re-test with the google map thingy shows me that dibs.net doesn't even want to know about Lucerne, and instead is fixated on suburbs and villages around Lucerne :(

My advice: Until there's some magical geolocation service that works 100% all of the time, don't offer it. I know I can change it on your site, but many many many people won't be doing that.

Thanks for the feedback slater. It's true that geolocation data is probably less accurate outside the US. And since I'm on a budget I use only free services (the paid data sources would have more accuracy). I might be missing your point, though. Emmen is only 4.4km from Lucerne, so the map search area is nearly identical. Is your issue that it says "Emmen" at the top?

You said it: Nearly identical. But in Europe, and more so in Switzerland where distances aren't so vast as in the US, 4.4km is "far away". Sounds silly, but it's true.

As for "my issue", it's the fact that I'm in more or less dead-central Lucerne, yet I can't for the life of me get the google maps widget to interact with your geolocation script to show "Lucerne". It gives me "Within 0 miles of" and then a list of suburbs and villages just outside of Lucerne: Emmen (4km away), Horw (about the same distance), Kriens (just outside of Lucerne), and Weggis, which is about 20km further down and on the other side of the lake! :D

kehunt, how can I contact with you? my email is on my profile page.

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