Update to Twitter Integration

By admin, 14 December, 2009, No Comment

We’ve recently released an update to theSUGGESTR.com that now allows for Twitter integration via the oAuth standard (this means is much safer for you since you don’t have to share your password).  Remember you can link your theSUGGESTR.com account with your Twitter account and have all your ratings and personalized suggestions posted so your followers can see.  You can also follow our bot (@thesuggestr_bot) and see ALL of the ratings and suggestions made on the site.

Remember you can also follow @thesuggestr to stay up to date on all the latest news about theSUGGESTR.com

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theSUGGESTR implements hreview-aggregate microformat

By admin, 11 December, 2009, No Comment

We’ve just updated our business pages so that they support the hreview-aggregate microformat.  As described by Microformats.org hreview-aggregate is

a format for embedding review information (of products, services, businesses, etc). Whereas hReview is intended for an individual review, hReview-aggregate is meant for summary information about a collection of user or critic reviews about an item.

Some examples of the marked pages can be found here:

http://www.thesuggestr.com/dest549.html
http://www.thesuggestr.com/dest26.html

What does this mean? Nothing for our users really – we wanted to make our reviews available to engines that consume microformats and over time may start to consume some ourselves to help improve our suggestion engine.  You can see some of the neat products created using similar semantic technologies by clicking here.

If you have any questions or comments about our implementation or some ideas on how we can take advantage of Microformats feel free to post a comment.

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Man vs. Food Map

By admin, 7 December, 2009, 1 Comment

We are please to announce the release of a map for the show “Man vs. Food“.  This Travel Channel show chronicles the travel’s of Adam Richman as he takes on some of the best food challenges around the world.

Using our new map you can quickly find places seen on the show in your area or anywhere you are traveling to.  Just use the zoom button on the map and click “Refine Search”.

Remember you can find a number of other “Food Maps” from other shows such as Diner’s Drive-Ins and Dives and Food Paradise.

Check our blog in the upcoming days so you can learn how you can use our service to get notified when your nearby one of the Man vs. Food destinations.

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The NEW theSUGGESTR.com

By admin, 29 November, 2009, 3 Comments

We are pleased to announce the release of a MAJOR update of theSUGGESTR.com.  This redesign completely changes the look and feel of the site and also introduces a number of new features.

Some of the key new features of our site include:

  • Improved Performance.
  • Improved Look & Feel.
  • A better search interface.
  • Improved Suggestions.
  • Simpler rating system.
  • Better “TV” Maps.

As always our primary goal is to provide you personalized suggestions for restaurants, bars, hotels and other local businesses your sure to love.  We use your tastes and the tastes of those like you to help make our suggestions.

Our new release focuses on making suggestion easier to get, more accurate and easier to access.  Our brand new look and feel should make using our site more pleasurable to your eyes and easier on your brain.  Our behind the scenes suggestion engine is now more accurate and will start providing suggestions with as little as two ratings (although with more ratings comes more accurate suggestions).

One of our favorite (and your favorite) features is our special TV Maps – where you can see the suggestions from some of your favorite shows such as Diners, Drive-Ins and Dives and Food Paradise.  Look out in the next week or so for us to add a new show (Man vs. Food).

Don’t forget using our alerts feature you can get notified when your near any of your personalized suggestions, places on your wish lists or places from your favorite TV shows.

We plan on continuing to update the site and offer more ways for you to keep in touch and get suggestions while on the go.

Please feel free to contact us with any feedback you have on our new site design.

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BB on Fire now with GPS

By admin, 14 October, 2009, 2 Comments

Our easy to use Blackberry FireEagle mobile  updater, BB on Fire, now supports GPS.  Prior versions just used your cell location.  If your lucky enough to have a GPS enabled blackberry BB on Fire will use it to determine your location and update FireEagle.  BB on Fire allows you to choose to only use cell location as well (in case your worried about battery usage).

Remember BB on Fire is still in Alpha and we are looking for testers and feedback so please spread the word.

Click Here to download the latest version (OTA Download).

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Linking Your FireEagle account to BB on Fire

By admin, 18 September, 2009, 4 Comments

We’ve just released an alpha version of BB on Fire, a simple to use Blackberry mobile updater for FireEagle that allows you to keep FireEagle (and all the application, such as theSUGGESTR that use FireEagle) up to date on your location.

The first step in using BB on Fire, or any FireEagle based application is to link the application to your FireEagle account.  If you don’t already have a FireEagle account go here to sign up.  The process to link the account is a little bit long but only should take 2-3 minutes and only needs to be done ONCE.  Here are some screen shots showing how to do it with BB on Fire.

After launching BB on Fire click the button to start the process.

Screen 1

Next you will see the generated token from FireEagle – for your convenience we’ve copied this onto your BlackBerry’s Clipboard (if for some reason that doesn’t work just write the token down). Next click launch browser to go to FireEagle’s site.

Screen 2

Next Step, login to FireEagle enter your token (remember it’s on you clipboard) and authorize the use BB on Fire:

Screen 3

8800-04

On the final screen you’ll see a code you need to type BACK into BB on Fire.

Screen 5

Finally, return to BB on Fire and enter in the 6 characters.

8800-06

Click Auth Complete.

That’s it!  Remember you only need to do that ONE TIME on your Blackberry and then you can use BB on Fire as much as you’d like.  Check out BB on Fire here.

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BB on Fire Alpha

By admin, 18 September, 2009, 7 Comments

We’ve just completed a first run at a simple Blackberry based mobile updater for FireEagle.  This application does not directly tie in to theSUGGESTR.com, however it can work along side our Alerts functionality to notify you when you are nearby any of your personalized suggestions, wish list or favorite food television show locations.  In a future post we’ll dive more into how to set this all up.  Click here to learn more about linking your FireEagle account with your BB on Fire app.

The application’s main purpose is to update FireEagle of your location at a regularly scheduled interval (you can configure it to be very frequent or infrequent).  Unlike some other updaters we do NOT use your GPS (although we may offer this in the future).  Why is this good? Well for one if you have a GSM phone without a GPS you can use our updater AND using cellular triangulation instead of GPS uses less power.

The application has some other bells and whistles such as being able to map your current location and see all the locations you’ve been at since the application started.  Also the application can run in the background to keep updates going even when your doing other things.

So far the application has only been tested on a 8320 running OS 4.5.  However it should work on ANY GSM phone with OS version 4.2.1 and greater.  We are looking for people to try the application out and give us some feedback (positive or negative).  Let us know your phone / carrier and OS version.

OTA Download.

Working On:
8320/Tmobile/4.5

Not Working On:
All CDMA (Sprint/Verizon)

Here are some screen shots of the application:

8800-07
8800-08
8800-09

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DDD Update

By admin, 16 September, 2009, No Comment

We’ve recently updated our database with latest places visited by Guy on Diner’s Drive-Ins and Dives.  You can check out the map by clicking here.

We are preparing a new release of theSuggestr.com that will provide better mapping and searching options, so stay tuned.

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Login to theSUGGESTR with your Twitter, Facebook, Google or Yahoo Account

By admin, 31 May, 2009, No Comment

Our goal is to provide you with personalized suggestions for places to eat, drink and shop wherever you are.  To make this process even easier than it was before we now allow you to register/login with your favorite accounts.  You can login with your Google, Yahoo, Twitter, FaceBook, OpenID and AOL accounts.  All you need to do is click the icons of the sites on our home page and authorize us.  From there you can login to theSUGGESTR.com with a single click.  No separate passwords to memorize.  We hope this makes it even easier for you to get the personalized suggestions you’re looking for.

We’ve implemented this solution through RPXnow.com.  We highly recommend this service as it’s been phenomenal in making our jobs easier in bringing to you this exciting feature.

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theSUGGESTR Alerts – Let’s you know when you’re nearby a place you’ll love!

By admin, 14 May, 2009, 1 Comment

We recently announced our integration with FireEagle, a Yahoo! service that allows our site to know where you are. With the announcement of our new alerts feature we will email you when you are nearby any of the places that we personally suggest for you, on your wish list or on any of the custom maps we provide for your favorite TV shows. And of course you can customize how it all works.

Basically how this all works is:

1) You link your FireEagle and theSUGGESTR account (from the “Stay Connected” link).

2) You configure what events you want alerts for:

tmp1

3) As your FireEagle account changes location we’ll determine if we need to let you know about a new alert. To avoid spamming you we won’t send more than 1 email a day and will only send emails when new suggestions are available.

That’s it, so imagine landing in a new city and automatically being sent a list of places you’re sure to love. Sounds good right? Well give it a shot and let us know what you think.

In the future we plan on using other location determining devices and software (GPS, Google Latitude, etc) but for now we are using FireEagle.

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