Following the success of Blog Friends V1, we again joined Luke and i-together to create a new app - Buzzspotr. Buzzspotr combines instant messaging and locations to enable you to quickly and easy see where the buzz is. The project was inspired by Lloyd Davis and Mike Butcher during the early days of starting the Social Media Cafe. As they are both avid users of twitter (like many of the Social Meda community in London), and they needed a way to organize gatherings of social media types, it was natural to combine twitter with Google Maps.
As the project progressed, it became clear it has a lot lot of potential, so Luke enlisted the input of Ofer Deshe from Flow Interactive to guide us in usability testing for a large group of bloggers. Whilst the interface is simple, the code is reasonably complex: on the front-end, we’ve almost entirely re-written Google’s map api from scratch; on the server-side we’ve deployed our in-house highly-scalable memcached “Kitteh” framework so the app can easily stand up to tens of thousands of users all from a single low-spec server.