Hi there, Vasanth here - we launched Splittable.co last week (for housesharers) and as part of that, we teamed up with findproperly.co.uk to build and publish a map we thought was interesting for London, showing the location/affordability tradeoffs made for how housesharing can help move you closer to central London. Data is from FindProperly, map visualisation made with some custom JS and google maps. I think Peter from FP is hanging around too so can answer any questions etc. Any comments/feedback welcome!
Thanks for the feedback! How the filters are set up right now is that the grey ones in the top right are the available ones for you choose from, and the orange ones below are the actual ones you've added and are active.
However, as I've said elsewhere, improving the usability of those controls is a big issue for us, we're looking at all the comments we get. Thanks for your suggestions around this.
>>What's your source of train time data? Are transfer times taken into account?
Train time data comes from the government's Naptan data set (http://data.gov.uk/dataset/naptan). Transfer times not yet fully accurate, it's on our to-do list.
The three of us have been working on it full time since September, having done some spare-time prototyping in the preceding months. We're now trying to secure some angel investment to help us continue building and growing, it's something we're all passionate about!
>>Having chosen these places and parameters (I chose 'crouch end' and 'dulwich'), I can't see any properties, just the standard gmaps lollipop icons on the map. I guess this is a bug? In any event it's unclear what I should do next - you'd lose me at this point
* There's a big transparent grey footer that doesn't contain anything - what's the purpose of that when you could just show more map?
Sorry about that - this sounds like a genuine bug. The grey footer is meant to display some text that tells you what to do next (property listings will appear in that area once you click on one of the orange areas of the map). If you could ping me to let me know what browser/version etc. that would be much appreciated!
Apart from that, everything else comes under "search controls usability" which is one of our top priorities for improvement, we'll definitely be doing some more work on those.
Yeah, the speed profiles we're using for the road travel have some inaccuracies as they don't yet account for traffic etc. We'll be putting in a separate mode for buses that will be based off more accurate TfL data, so hopefully won't see as bad a wormhole as that once that's in place!
We've been hearing this a lot from speaking to people. Right now, it's a bit difficult as we're just using Zoopla's API (http://developer.zoopla.com/) for the listings. To try and minimise the problem, by default we're showing property listings by Most Recently Published.
Thanks! Cycling is one of the data points we are planning to add v soon, pretty much as you described (using average speed profile to calculate the travel times).
We're also planning on integrating a lot more data - there's a whole load of open government stuff (think crime stats, schools data) in particular that we're looking at.
We've spent the last few weeks building Locatable, a property search website for London. We've integrated lots of transport data (tube/rail/road) to help you figure out where to live. Road travel times are a bit off at the moment, but we're working on it. Just looking to get feedback from other HNers, let us know what you think!