ZAT – notes on Z to A Travel

I’ve been reading some essays by Paul Graham. While I don’t agree with everything he says (and strongly disagree with a few things he says) he makes much much more sense than most people talking about technology businesses. Many of his experiences mirror my experiences starting and working in startups. And a lot of what he says is a surprisingly good description of what I am trying to do with ZAT.

Here are some good essays of his to read:

Web 2.0 (http://www.paulgraham.com/web20.html) does an excellent job of describing the new wave of Web applications and what makes them different. The three key ideas are Ajax, democracy, and not dissing users. His names are poor, but the concepts behind the ideas are spot on.

How to Start a Startup (http://www.paulgraham.com/start.html) is a kind of “startups for dummies” and The Hardest Lessons for Startups to Learn (http://www.paulgraham.com/startuplessons.html) is a list of points that all startups must keep in mind in order to survive and prosper.

Most of the work I’m doing right now is in the realm of infrastructure — figuring out what software to use to build Zat. The questions I’m trying to answer now include:

What language to use. Main contenders right now are PHP and Ruby. I’m leaning toward PHP mainly because there are open source versions of Digg, Del.icio.us, and even Flickr that I can use to implement similar features in Zat.

If I use PHP, what framework to use. I’m looking into CakePHP, which is receiving generally favorable reviews.

What database to use. Biggest issue is GIS support. There is a free extension to PostGreSQL called PostGIS (http://www.postgis.org/), so for a while I was pretty committed to using PostGreSQL. But I just noticed that the Reference Manual for version 5 of MySQL has some Spatial Extensions (http://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/5.0/en/spatial-extensions.html). So now I have to do some more research to see if MySQL will be good enough. The main advantage of MySQL is speed and (to a lesser extent) ease of use.

I had a brainstorm about a new concept I’m calling “ratags”. Cindy helped me come up with the name — it is a combination of rating and tag. Ratags are like the tagging systems used by del.icio.us, flickr, and other sites, except that the tags are parameterized. So instead of just the tag, there is a value associated with the tag. The value associated with the tag can be of different kinds. It could be a rating (one to five stars, or thumbs up / thumbs down). A value could also be a date, or a range of dates. Or it could just be a number. So in addition to just adding tags to things, you can use ratags to assign ratings.

For example, a bicycle rider might want to tag a road with its grade (how steep it is), so there could be a ratag called “grade” that takes a value (e.g., flat through steep).

Want to not only allow people to define their own ratags (like they currently can define tags) but also to let them define new kinds of ratags. Each kind of ratag, including user defined kinds, should have a graphical representation (one to five stars, thumbs up / thumbs down, etc.)

Furthermore, I had been thinking about the community aspects of Zat, and want to provide interest groups (or just groups). Certain ratags can be associated with groups. For example, if there is a bicycling group, they could have ratags for “grade” and for how wide the shoulder of the road is, etc. Groups can also be hierarchical, so that within the bicycling group, there can be subgroups for touring bicycling and for off-road bicycling, since their ratags would be different. Same thing with boating. Subgroups could include sailing and motorboating, etc.

–wm

I’ve been trying to figure out a quick description of what Zat does. I’ve been worried because it was turning into three (albeit closely related) things: a spatial search engine, a route planner, and a community for travelers. A website needs to have focus, so that when people think of Zat, they think of one thing.

And that thing is “trip planning and sharing”. Yeah, I know, that’s kinda two things, but it includes everything else.

So Zat is the “trip planning and sharing” site.

–wm