Pizzashare

when I first saw the name I thought 'cool!'- I was thinking that this is a site that poor college kids can use to get together and split the price of a whole pizza or two (for more variety and meeting new ppl - along with a tool showing what everyone owes for the pizzas including tip)... I was a bit disappointed when this wasn't the case.

I may be missing something but I just don't see the point of this web app (as a super focused yelp) when the yelps of world already have tons of data and tons of users for this very thing

I've never liked sites that start the user off on a crowded country-wide Google Maps view. It seems like such a clumsy way to display data. One, I don't want or need to find every pizza place in the US, so why show it to me? and 2. it's overwhelming and a pain in the ass to have to zoom into my location.

Google Maps embeds are fine as a way to put things on a map for searches inside a specific, narrowly defined location. But they're not so good as the first thing you'd see.

I'd ditch the giant US map and redesign to put more emphasis on the zip/city search box -- maybe get a fix on the user's location by IP and automatically pop up popular pizza places nearby.

Also, a bug: I was able to share my favorite pizza place over and over again ... so really easy to game the system.

I gave this site a try and added pizza places that I like in Toronto, ON.

- I was disappointed that I couldn't add any comments, notes or tags (you could even display badges for top picks in categories like "cheap", "organic", "fast", "high end" on your map). It would have been cool to link to the boingboing.net article referencing Massimo pizza or to recommend my favorite types of pizza at each place.

- I had issues where the green marker pins would be placed in the wrong spot if I: shared a restaurant, typed in the name of another restaurant, and clicked OK. This happened twice (FF 3.0.6 on WinXP).

- I like the look and feel design of the site but I partially agree with some other posters here who ask what distinguishes your site from the mass market players like yelp. Being pizza-only makes using your site really easy to use, but I'm not sure if that's enough. My random brainstormed thought: Could you make recommending and searching for great pizza places into a game that's fun enough to pique the interest of a first time visitor?

Took a quick look. Seems like this suffers from the chicken/egg social network problem. The more users there are, the better the data/app will be. However, users won't use the app until the data/app returns better results.

Example: I put in 92602 (Irvine in OC). Only two pizza stores popped up-both chains (Little Caesars & Round Table) and both >8 mi from the middle of 92602. As a user, this is an immediate turn off because the app isn't helping me find great pizza places. It is only showing me pizza places that I know about-ones that are far from me to boot. I know for a fact that there is a Round Table Pizza that is much closer than the one mapped.

To combat this, you might want to load up some data programmatically so that you have a baseline (scraping PizzaHut.com or Dominoes.com would be a start). Users can then add to your base data set as well as vote up ("share") places that already exist.

I. Love. Pizza.

And I love mom and pop pizza shops and am against the chain onces. In that sense, I really like the concept of this website but it doesn't deliver on usability.

If I do a quick search in Los Angeles, only Mulberry St. Pizza pops us. If I do it again, Pizzeria Mozza pops up. What is with the inconsistency? What do all the colors mean? Why won't my added location pop up when I search for it? Once all these bugs are fixed and there is a larger user base then all the pizza lovers of the world would think your website is awesome. It is different from Yelp and I like that because it is not cluttered. In any case, I would say to continue working on it and in the end it will pay off somewhat.

Hmm. I thought everybody got this out of their system in 2005. You know, Google Maps API comes out and everybody writes that little test application where you can put pins in the map and store locations in a database. Dozens of sites that look exactly like this this went live over a 3 week period. Some of them inexplicably even got funded.

But it's 2009 now. It's a bit hard to get excited about this.

Thanks for the insight guys, this has only been up for two weeks and I really appreciate the feedback. There are definitely some bugs on here and you are right about me taking off those pizza chains(dominos, pizza hut etc...) I want to incorporate a lot of these suggestions into the beta version which should be coming out in a month or two, but it will be more a less a total makeover.

I can't seem to get it to add either of my favorite pizza places in Cambridge, MA 01238 ('Cambridge 1' and 'The Upper Crust'). Am I doing something wrong?

Their URLs are http://cambridge1.us/ and http://www.theuppercrustpizzeria.com/

Not really a fan of the popup for the zipcode. Maybe do a geolocate for the ip and match that way

Interesting concept. I wonder: are the circle sizes proportional to the total number of shares country-wide, or are they proportional to the number of shares within some shorter distance?

There seems to be an escaping issue. Around the SF Bay Area, there's a pizza place called "Mary's Pizza Shack" that on mouse hover only says "Mary."

Wow. Talk about a really, really, long tail here.

What does this do that Yelp doesn't?

Grimaldi's is for tourists.

Why US only?

dig the color scheme and look.