Imagine: you're searching for a nearby yoga studio. You fire up your trusty laptop, Google "Cambridge Yoga," and to your delight, find countless results, mostly situated right on nearby Mass. Ave. You head out the door, ready to practice your 'awkward chair pose' asana, and suddenly realize you have no idea where you're going.
Sure, you know where Mass. Ave is - but you didn't realize it spanned all of Cambridge. Are you going to Porter? Harvard? Central? Somewhere else?
Enter Mark Robinton (E '05). The above situation prompted Robinton to start the Web site Bostonsquares.com, which has been online since July 2003.
"I came up with this idea of creating a Web site that's actually organized by square," Robinton said. "Most [Web sites] right now you can't search by square, you have to search by town. So you get 'Cambridge, 11 Mass. Ave - am I near that?'"
The site, Robinton explained, makes traveling by T far simpler, as it allows users to map Boston as a series of squares (and thus T stops) rather than random addresses. Robinton, now a graduate student in electrical engineering at Tufts, designed Boston Squares and had a friend help him update it to its latest incarnation as a wiki-style site
(Wiki technology allows visitors to add, remove, and edit a Web site's content themselves; the best known site is Wikipedia.org.)
"Users can actually edit the data, so it's not just me editing," he said. "You have to be a member to change things, [but] you can comment anonymously and rate things anonymously."
Robinton explained that the login feature was created to help prevent "wiki-feity - where people just go in and randomly edit stuff to screw up your site."
So far, the site includes Davis, Harvard, Porter, Kenmore, Ball, Teele, Central, Inman, and Copley Squares, as well as Powderhouse Circle. "We haven't added any non-real squares yet, but we'd like to," Robinton said. "Like Park Street - technically it's not a square."
Bostonsquares.com was aimed at Tufts students "to start," though Robinton said that "ideally, we'd like to aim it to all college or Boston-area people."
When the site began, Robinton provided all the reviews, though the switch to wiki technology helped relieve some of that burden. Now, he simply uploads the pictures and adds new squares and leaves it up to users to fill in the information.
"We have 65 users right now," Robinton said. The site gets about 110 visitors per day, and in the month of October, it was visited a total of 3,090 times by 2,125 people." Robinton explained that seeing the user statistics is one of the most rewarding parts of creating the site: "I love seeing how many users we get," he said, adding that seeing the stats makes him think, "Wow, 115 people came to the site that I made."
Despite its growing popularity, Robinton said that the site is still "just a side project." Robinton works full-time at Mobile Mind, a software company in Watertown, Mass. in addition to being a full-time graduate student. Still, "I'd like to go as far as I can [with the site]," he said.
The lack of advertising, however, has presented hurdles: "We don't really have a budget," Robinton said. "We don't advertise on the site ... most of the ads that actually pay you are really annoying; unless it was worth it, we didn't want to do that. We'd rather have a useful site for now."
If the site were to have advertisements, Robinton explained that they would be limited: "We'd ideally like to have maybe one sponsor per square - maybe one business ad saying, 'this square brought to you by Mike's Pizza,'" he said. Each square's sponsor would be a business within the square, Robinton explained.
Besides just the sponsoring idea, Robinton has many plans for the site's future. The switch to wiki technology was just the first interesting change: "Our biggest feature we're working to add is called 'Boston Squares SMS,'" Robinton said, which he explained would be a text-messaging capability.
A traveler could text-message BostonSquares.com from their cell phone looking for a particular business and be sent back the square location and address.
Besides just expanding its features, the site is also ever-expanding its list of squares. "We want to add Kendall," Robinton said, adding that they are also planning to further expand the range of the Kenmore Square page.
Robinton is also hoping to expand the community feel of the site: "One of our next developments is going to be enhancing what you can do with your user profile," he said..
"We just wanted some validity to the people that are editing," he said.
Robinton's favorite current feature, however, is far simpler than wiki technology, community profiles and text message capability. "The one thing I think helps our site stand out is that we always have pictures of every place," he said. "We like the idea of walking into a square and being able to recognize everything."
"You can feel familiar in the square by looking at our pictures," he added.
