Tag My City messaging feature is almost ready for deployment.

When deployed, users will be able to contact each other by sending internal messages.

Click on the picture to see more screenshots.

Posted in Entrepreneurship, Ruby on Rails, Web 2.0 | Tags messages, networking, social, tagmycity, web2.0 | 50 comments

I am working right now on adding few functionalities to Tag My City

• Add users as party buddies (Social Networking)
• Subscribe to your buddies events. e.g If I subscribe to my buddy’s events, I will be notified (email or SMS) every time she sign up for an event.
• Subscribe to places events. e.g If I subscribe to a certain place events, then I will be notified about every event that will occur in that place.
• Subscribe to places news-letters and specials. This way, you will be the first one to know about VIP passes or special discounts.

If you like to recommend more things to be added, then please feel free to contact

me: kinan [at] tektactic [dot] com

or

Callie: callie [at] tagmycity [dot] com

TagMyCity.com is officially live.

TagMyCity (TMC) gives a unique twist to social networking. Unlike other social networks that focus on people, TMC casts the focus on events and places.
This list highlights some of TMC features:

• Search places such as restaurants, bars, clubs, spas, etc.
• Get place information: address, rating, price range, payment options, dress code, parking, etc
• Create user profile
• Rate and review places
• Upload pictures of places and users
• Create events calendar or attend existig events
• SMS notification of events (coming soon)
• Create groups and social networking (coming soon)

TMC’s calendar shows the event’s name, date, time, and address. It also gives a description and category. And it provides a list of all the users that plan to attend the event.

As of now, TMC services the Dallas (DFW) area. More cities will be available in the near future. Dallas area residents or people planning to visit Dallas can get the scoop on BigD. Users can search Dallas restaurants, clubs, bars, spas, art galleries, shops, hotels, etc. Users are encouraged to upload photos and stories from these locations. TMC lets users share their experiences with the rest of the world.

TMC also provides users with maps and driving directions using Google maps. All the activities are real time which means when a user review a place or add an event, the information will be available on the website right away with no moderation.

More features are in the works, and the TMC crew is always thinking of ways to improve the website. Please sign up and let us know what you like, what you don’t like…let us know anything we can do to maximize your(the user’s) experience.

We are getting closer and closer to launch TMC (Tag My City) website. We’ve been doing a lot of last minute fixes and enhancements before we go live on Sept 1, 2006.

We are also getting ready for BarCamp Texas in Austin.

I guess that’s it for now I gotta go write some code..

If you work in the HR business, you probably know that finding talented and qualified people is not an easy task. Typical job boards such as monster and dice were designed to provide an electronic searchable resumes. But they didn’t introduce innovative ways to find talented people.

The current resume format is outdated and strict. It doesn’t allow candidates to freely represent themselves and showcase their talent.

I tried to find a solution for this problem by creating Things I Can Do, the website uses tagging and weblog-like profiles to provide users with the right tools to express their skills and knowledge.

Users can create profiles, upload pictures, add skills and tag them with keywords.
They can also rate and add comments to each other�s skills.

The website is still in beta version and It’s due to a major makeover release.

Cade and I are planning on taking this website to the next level by creating a better resume structure. The new release will support more functionalities such as Pod-Casting, RSS feed, Skype integration and Microformats support.

Feedback is appreciated…

I’ve been working this weekend on creating TMC (Tag My City) events’ calendar. I’ve already finished the prototype and both Callie and Cade seem to like it.

The production version of the calendar will have event’s name, date, time, address, description, category, tags and access level (public or private). It will also have links to the place of the event and to all the users attending that event.

The calendar can be filtered by date, category, city, place(restaurant, university, etc.) or user

Oh I almost forgot, TMC calendar is compliant with hCalendar

We are still planning on launching the beta version of TMC (www.tagmycity.com) on August 31 without making changes to the project scope…. not yet ;)

Tag My City(TMC) team has been updating the website�s XHTML/CSS to be Microformats compliant.
By adopting Microforamts, TMC�s public information will be more accessible on the web.
In addition, events calendar and contacts information can be integrated and reused easily between different applications. For example; you could automatically synchronize your cellphone or desktop calendar with TMC events calendar. And you can add restaurants� contact information to your address book with a click of a button.

Background information

Web content is usually created for human consumption without paying attention to machine readability making it difficult to provide elegant solutions to information retrieval and data integration.

This problem is what�s known as transforming data into information. Most solutions propose adding metadata(description) to data to give it meaning, thus to make it understandable by machines.

Semantic Web encourages using standardized vocabularies to describe data. As the name implies, standardized vocabularies are standard keywords or tags that describe data.

Microformats provide powerful yet simple sets of data formats that can be simply added to web content to make it both readable by humans and machines.
These sets are growing very fast to cover most forms of data e.g. contacts, reviews, events, resumes, listings, tags, etc.

Using Microformats is very easy. For example if you want to present a user name in your web content then you use the standard tags to describe both first name and last name. Let�s say �fn??? means full name. Now you can add �fn??? to your XHTML


<span class=???vcard???> <span class=???fn???>Kinan Sweidan</span></span>


When a machine reads �vcard??? it understands that the tag contains contact information. Similarly when it reads �fn?, it understands that �fn? means full name.

This approach is very powerful because it allows accurate information retrieval. Let�s say I want to look up reviews for �McDonalds??? by �Bill Clinton?, the machine (in this case the search engine) will try to deliver accurate information by searching metadata (for example �fn? and �hreview?) combined with my keywords (�Bill Clinton? and �McDonalds???)

Microformats make data integration much easier allowing different applications to exchange and reuse data.