We got an email today that sums up a couple questions many people were having – so I thought i’d answer them in public.
Q) Very excited about the service. I was just fooling around with it and had a few quick questions. I love the fact that Foursquare is incorporated. Is the map eventually going to include the Foursquare’s history of check ins? The data is on the Foursquare site and would really fill out the map.
A) The map presently pulls in all your checkins from Foursquare and displays them. We can also pull in all your friend’s checkins to show those separately. But we are undecided if we should. We totally agree it would fill out the map and give you lots of good ideas about places to explore, but it also fuzzes a line we drew around ourselves that says “TripTrace is a private repository of my data; I never want to be worried that my content is being shared in some way that exposes me somehow. I don’t want to have to mess with privacy settings and just trust that unless I explicitly need to share something, it will be maintained privately.” While it is true that this stream of checkin data is content your friends have created on Foursquare (or Facebook, for that matter) for the explicit purpose of sharing it – that’s what Foursquare and Facebook excel at. TripTrace lets you utilize that data for something else entirely. So all this is to say that we *can* put it in your map, and we think it would be useful, but we want to make sure we’re developing a reputation that is trusted as private. These things are important so we’re going slowly there. What do you think?
Q) How do you get the clip thing into the Chrome browser?
A) I have to say, we were looking at the users of TripTrace this afternoon and were all interested to see what an enormous percentage are Chrome users. Just thought you’d be interested in that. As far as the TripClipper getting dragged to the menu bar, uh — hold on. I’m going to check with Tom. Back shortly. I’ll answer the rest of these then come back and edit this.
A Half Hour Later: We looked into this, and it sure seems to work on our Chrome browsers. The clipper has to be dragged to the bookmarks toolbar, so if that’s not displayed, there won’t be any place to drag it. But the toolbar open is the default setting of Chrome, so if it’s not there, I think someone turned it off. Anyway, see if you can turn yours on, drag the clipper to it, and let us know if the problem persists. Is anyone else having a Chrome problem like this?
Q) I’m having trouble adding places I’ve been that aren’t part of the quiz. I went through every page of quiz but still have a bunch of places to add. How do you do that?
A) You went through every page of the quiz?? Wow. First, and it’s probably too late to mention it, but the listed quiz cities are bounded by the map on the left, so if you zoom in on a state or region, it will list just the cities it has in that region. Second, we’ve got about 20,000 cities in there, and it is not exhaustive of the earth’s cities. We didn’t know if anyone would do it. So we stopped at 20K. Seemed like a lot. Turns out, it sometimes feels thin. We’ll add more, but not right now. Cooler features to add. Sorry, you can’t add pins to cities that aren’t in the list. (You can make maps of them, however, simply by zooming in to any places and selecting the SAVE NEW MAP blue dog-eared corner at the top left of the page).
Q) Is there a way to organize a trip that hits two different places?
A) Not yet.
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