Check out the official site for the Find Craft Beer application at findcraftbeer.com

This application uses the Beer Mapping API to find Breweries, Brewpubs, Beer Bars, Stores or Homebrew Shops near your current location. The app displays review scores from Beer Mapping and includes links to the mobile version of our site, in case you wish to read more reviews for a specific location. Click the image below to see more screenshots of the application in action.

The Find Craft Beer application will also enable you to use a city or zip code as the starting point for a search, using options to narrow down results by location type.

This application is available in the App Store now. Go get it and let us know what you think!

The new feature is a little graphic that appears in what used to be some white space above and to the right of the location address information. This graphic is actually a dynamically generated image that is provided to us through one of google’s chart technologies. We’re using this technology to create what is called a QR Code (quick response code).

Here is an example of what the QR Code looks like on the review page (note the big red arrow):

These codes can be scanned via some special software that you can install on many different types of smart phones. Android phones can use the “Barcode Scanner” application to scan the codes. iPhones and Blackberries and other phones can possibly use an application provided by BeeTagg or possibly the Kaywa Reader.

After the image is scanned your mobile device will decrypt the QR Code and show you the information contained within. In our case, a scan will put the mobile version of that page onto your phone, allowing you to bookmark locations you want to visit or look at later.

An example of a QR Code containing the url for the mobile page for 21st Amendment Brewpub:

If you are still a bit confused as to what we’re talking about here, or if you just want to see this scanning technology in action, watch the following 45 second video. It is a bit blurry, but we hope it gets the point across!

Step over to our shop and take advantage of the discount this weekend!

If you want to read more about our POI system, we have a whole section in our forums dedicated to discussion about it. Check that out here.

Anyone think the “huge sale” graphic might be a little over the top?

Actually, if you’ve been following us for a while, you know we have been working on our attempts to blend Beer Mapping and the Twitter API for some time now (first mention of integration: December 05, 2007 in the forums). We’ve seen a few bugs and a few lost brain cells in trying to make everything work properly, but everything seems to be flying smooth at the moment. A list of twitter/Beer Mapping users can be found here: beermapping.com/twitter/.

If you want to read more about how we have integrated twitter, we wrote a blog post back in April of 2008 about our Twitter/Beer Mapping blend of custom maps for users. If you just want to scroll through the list of Beer Mappers that are using twitter, you can check that out here: beermapping.com/twitter/.

As always, if you have ideas or angry rants, post them in the comments or go vent in the forums. Try to avoid the all caps Oprah-like rants, or we’ll virtually mess you up!

The Buddy Activity page will display the site actions of the people you wish to follow. This function is only available to registered members (because you need a trackable account in order to have buddies to follow). But since registration is simple and easy, this should not be much of a deterrent.

This particular page is now tracking reviews, image uploads and forums threads that are added to the site by your buddies over the past 2 weeks. If your parents ground you from the internet and you have to miss a day or two, this page will let you jump right back in and check out what your friends have been up to!

If you don’t have any buddies, jump on it and make some friends on the site!

This feature, along with pages such as the Path Crossers page are implemented with the hopes that they are able to build a sense of community on the site.

If you need some more bling for your Google Homepage, check out an example of the blog below and click the “+ google” button underneath the example widget to add it to your personal homepage.

If you have an idea for other tools or widgets that Beer Mapping can create and release into the wild; feel free to use our contact page and tell us about it. Or leave a comment below or in the forums.

Our newest “Widget” will contain pertinent information about a location in our database. All locations are available to be used in a widget, you simply have to click the proper link on the review page to have the ability to copy and paste the code into your site.

The code for this widget is all in javascript, so you don’t have to worry about iframes or php code. We have done our best to ensure that this widget will not interfere with any other css or styling that is being used on your page.

For an example, of how the widget works, you can check it out in use below. We have selected the Russian River Brewing Company. All you have to do is click the “widget button” (image of review button below) on the review page of a location you are interested in featuring, then copy and paste the code into the html (or blog post) of your site.

The widget will show phone number and address information, the url of the location featured, a thumbnail of the highest scored image we have in our database for that location, and it will also display the coordinates available that will serve as a link to this location on a map.

The widget will conform to the height of the thumbnail image (unless closed) and it will conform to the width of the area of your site where the code for the widget is placed.

p.s. I stole the idea and a lot of the code from crunchbase. I hope they don’t sue me!

Beer Mapping Forums Integration

The integration we have set up here at Beer Mapping is on multiple levels. First you can simply grab the unique id from your twitter feed (click the “rss” button at the bottom of your twitter page and the url on the next page will contain that id. It should look something like this: http://twitter.com/statuses/user_timeline/10842552.rss We only need to paste the number, not the whole url.). Then when you have your twitter id you can place it in your user profile here at The Beer Mapping Project.

The process has changed slightly and is more streamlined. You simply have to be a registered user of the site and click the link onthis page.

Once that is done, your most recently updated twitter status post (often called a tweet) will automatically show up in your forums signature on this site. The status is limited to 140 characters so it doesn’t take up much room and it is very easy for others to ignore if they don’t want to read them while checking out the forums.

The Twitter integration doesn’t stop there though. And here is where the kooky article title comes into play.

Beer Mapping Mobile Integration

Beer Mapping Mobile is now integrated with a twitter geocoder that will help you create a twitter post that is tagged with either a location in our database or the geographical coordinates of the address where you are posting from. If you want to make a tweet while on the go at a local brewpub, you can look that location up in Beer Mapping Mobile and you can then click the “Post to Twitter” link to make a status update from that location.

Once you select to post a tweet from that location you come to a page that will look like the image on the right. You enter your twitter username and password (we do not store this information) and your status update. Beer Mapping Mobile will take care of the rest. If you don’t want to post from a location, you can still get your location tagged with coordinates if you approach the Mobile Twitter page from this link (or a link just like it at the top of the mobile search page).

I can hear you now, “What good does any of this do”? Well, I’m glad you asked.

Because your tweets are getting either a unique id from a location in the Beer Mapping database, or latitude/longitude from a posted address, we can grab your twitter status updates that have this information and we can display them on a map on the site.

For example: here is my twitter map.

Family Circus Style Maps!

Now, you can be just like Jeffy from the Family Circus! We can all wake up on Sunday morning and see a map of your adventures hopping from brewpub to beer bar to brewery! You can view your map later to see if you can get an idea as to where you may have put down your cell phone. All the ladies that think you are hot can now watch your map to see if you are anywhere nearby where they might stalk you (The Beer Mapping Project is not responsible for the stalking).

Twitter is an awesome way of letting others know what you are up to. The Beer Mapping Project is a great way to find out how close you are to good beer. And with the addition of integrating your precise location with each tweet, we can create virtual pub crawls where anyone online can follow along.

Keep an eye on my map today (April 5th 2008) and I hope to document the Chicago Beer Mapping pub crawl. My goal is to post from each location we visit and possibly from some public transportation along the way.

Sign up for a twitter account and merge it with your Beer Mapping account today to get a dynamic twitter map that you can pass along to your friends.

This page is a work in progress and we hope to have a few other pages linked off of the initial Tools and Applications page. For example; we have a page that is solely devoted to RSS and Syndication Options and how to use the many RSS feeds that we have available here.

There are a few sections that we have yet to complete. In these sections we hope to have a rundown of our facebook applications. A description with instructions for installing our wordpress widget, and a way for our html savvy users to get code for installing their own Beer Mapping badge. Keep an eye out for more updates to this section.

Our goal is to keep you coming back, by providing as many tools and options for interaction with the site as possible.

This first image is displaying results of a search. Users will be able to add comments and scores for each location directly on the search results page (via Ajax).

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The next image is displaying the recently added “visits” page. I will likely add an rss option here so you can get updates on new brewery visits.

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The third picture is a screenshot of “your visits”. This page is also set up to allow you to see other user’s reviews. It isn’t firmly clear how we are going to link people to other users, but we will have that cleared up soon.

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And finally, you can see here what the widget looks like that sits in a users profile page. Currently it is only displaying the last visit. We may expand this to show the last few visits. But we’re trying to keep it simple at the moment. This widget updates itself on your profile page at the same moment that you enter a review.

As I am typing this I notice that I didn’t even set up an image of how the maps work into the whole thing. Also, for those of you with no interest in facebook, you should also note that we will be aggregating this information and if it turns out that we are bringing in good information/metrics, we can easily work that into the main site as more statistics for locations.

I’m expecting to release this application into the wild in the next few days. Then you can start adding locations!