We have a full fledged mobile site (beermapping.com/m) with search, forums, reviews and even proximity functions available. And our system also works with all recent versions of google’s mobile mapping software. If this interests you, check out our Mobile Functions page.

Here is what we have to say about our mobile functionality on our tools and applications page:

Mobile Functionality

The Mobile Lookup page is simply a scaled down version of our regular location search functionality here on the main site. We’ve set up our Mobile Lookup page to be a very easy to remember url:
http://beermapping.com/m (the M is for mobile).

We also have set up some Mobile Map functionality that is now linked from the Mobile Maps Lookup page. You can read more about the Mobile Map functions click the following link:
Mobile Maps and Applications

Reviews, score breakdowns, weather, traffic and maps are all available through the beermapping.com/m url. We’ve even included a tiny version of the regular forums as well if you like to participate in discussions while on the go. As far as we are aware, there isn’t a beer based website around that is providing the level of mobile functionality that The Beer Mapping Project is giving you. Recently we’ve also integrated Twitter into our mobile application.

If you have any ideas about how we can better help flesh our our mobile interfaces, please let us know in the comments. We know that many of you will mention or ask about iPhone apps or applications for other platforms. Well, there are some applications under development for iPhone, Android and possibly Blackberry. The only one that we have been working on in-house is the Android application. You can watch a teaser video of it here.

Note: Even though our beers are mobile, we would still like for you to be responsible and avoid drinking and driving. We encourage our users to add any public transportation options to their reviews and if there is no public transportation readily available, please find a designated driver.

A search for ‘rock bottom’:

A close-up of the Map Link:

Clicking on the link on a search results page will take you to a map that will attempt to display all locations in the results from your search. There are still a few bugs, but we are working through them and have this feature fully flushed out very soon. For now, play around with it and let us know what you think in the comments here or in the forums.

The results of a mapped search for ‘rock bottom’:

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!

Basically this feature adds the ability to hide any locations on the city maps that you have already reviewed. If you want to see only the places that you have reviewed, that option is available as well.

As you can see from the image here, we have added three new icons/buttons to the City Maps (and Proximity Maps) that you can use to change the visibility settings. These options are only available if you are a registered user and if you are logged in to the site. They can be found at the top right of the map and they can be used to toggle locations you have reviewed on or off of the map. Hover over the icons to see what each one does, or read more about their functionality here.

The goal here is to help you find new locations in an area to visit and at the same time offer some help finding which locations you may have visited but have so far neglected to review. Get out there and drink some beer!

We hope to have this functionality available on all maps in the near future.

One section of the site that very few people check out, are our statistics. We like to be open about things and we intentionally expose many of the numbers that show how active (or inactive) parts of the site may be.

On our Statistics Page, you can see how many approved locations we have in the database (almost 8,000 at the time of this posting). We break it down by our major countries (scroll down). And on this page we list location images count (2,827), location review count (3,323) and other interesting statistics like average review score (82).

We even offer more statistics about activity on the site on our Activity Statistics Page. This page will show you graphs from the last 31 days (not including today). They’re not exactly real time, but they do give you an idea as to the activity of the site.

If you’re still digging the numbers and you aren’t satisfied yet, you can also check out our Forum Statistics Page. You can see when our most active months for posting were, and you can track how many users registered over the lifetime of the forums. I enjoy checking this page somewhat often and there is even a thread started in the forums about these statistics.

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.

After a search is performed, a user can choose to download the results of a search as a .csv based POI file.

The Point of Interest download ability is available to registered members who have subscribed to the service. A lifetime subscription is available now in the Beer Mapping Shop for 15 dollars.

Discussion about POI files and how you can easily format or manipulate them will be taking place in our forums. The discussion is open to all and that forum section can be found here.

Click Here to get Started.