Fellow Nestorinians,
today we announce another new service for property hunters.
Where Can I Live? is a new service designed to make it simple for London commuters to find areas that might be relevant for your property search. Basically, we were very familiar with the use case of knowing where you will work (or study or otherwise spend your day), knowing how much money you have to spend, but not knowing where in London to live. We hope this tool can help solve that problem.
Like all of the services we feature on our interface testbed
Lokku Labs, this is an experiment designed to help us learn about how users want to search for property. One major challenge we face with Nestoria is that we have only one website that tries to simultaneously meet the needs of many diverse user groups. We build these test sites as a way to try out new interfaces and new technologies that aren’t yet ready for primetime on Nestoria.
Some words of thanks for the folks involved. First of all, full credit to
mySociety and their
time-travel maps. Those proof of concepts gave us the idea. So last summer we
started working with Chris Osborne. Chris did most of the conceptual work and built a prototype as his master’s project at UCL (
BTW since working with us, Chris has gone on to big things, and currently runs #geomob a meetup of London geo and mobile developers. We’re looking forward to a great event this Thursday). London-based
Doodledo helped us on the design and technically scaling things up. On a final note, big thanks to all the
OpenStreetMap volunteers who created the maps.
There’s been some initial coverage of the service over on
Property Portal Watch,
Renthusiast, and
TechCrunch.
Based on that initial coverage, we’ve been lucky enough to already get some initial feedback. This is just version 1, we know we need to add things like Overground Stations and bus routes. We’re working on it. Please let us know what you think.
Finally, we do hope this site and the other Lokku Labs sites proves inspirational for others. If you’re a researcher or academic looking to do interesting things with property information or you’re a web developer looking for an interesting project to show off your mad interface and data slinging skillz please get in touch.
