Who is Living Manhattan? We work on New York since the end of 2008, but some of us have been hanging out in town since he was little and some of us since 1998. Our site is known for dealing with a niche within a niche: we rent apartments in New York for Italian travelers. We started with a townhouse on 51st Street and now have nearly 400 apartments from various owners. I welcomed hundreds of Italian friends to New York and invariably the first most popular questions concerned the Neighborhood: where is the supermarket, is there a restaurant nearby, there is something to see nearby ...
Based on this I decided to create a map to be found in the apartments and that it was also available online.
So I created this map I printed it, I added a short url that made it practical to enter the address on a computer and a QR code for the most technological with smartphones.
When I found out foursquare, at the beginning of 2010, I immediately thought about how it could be declined from a tourism perspective. In all these years we have got an idea of the behavior of our customers when choosing an apartment: they inquire online, read reviews, search the Facebook fan page for previous customers for advice, and do a lot of research on what to do and see in order to choose the more strategic position possible for your needs.
What to do then? For reasons of time and resources we could not have created another 16 google maps for as many areas covered by our site, therefore together with ours developer Ivan we experimented with the use of foursquare. Using the platform that foursquare provides we were able to "fish" the luoghi which are located within a few hundred meters of each single apartment and which are recommended by users Made in NYC app.
The places on foursquare are "crowdsourcedThat is, they are created by users and in case of errors and duplicates they are edited by SuperUsers: users who know the policies and take care of keeping the list of places "clean". Furthermore, users are often gods real experts in their area and this makes it much more reliable the recommendations present.
For ours mini-guide we have limited ourselves to showing only a few categories, just to give points of reference of what can be found nearby: if you choose a apartment in the Empire State Building among the places of interest are the Empire State Building 86th Floor Observatory and the Bryant Park - Library Terrace, in the restaurant category there are the expensive Ai Fiori and the cheap Pret A Manger and in the art category there is The Morgan Library & Museum. For the moment we stop here, but it is not certain that something more substantial will arrive in the future ;-)
