Where in the world is FreshBooks?
Where in the world are people accessing FreshBooks?
One Friday per month we have developer Hack Offs at FreshBooks. Hack Offs are one day code sprints, where our developers are given the entire day to work on whatever they want. They’re a lot of fun and it’s amazing how often ideas that start as Hack Offs make their way into the product.
Last Hack Off I thought it would be interesting to see from where in the world people were using FreshBooks right now. I figured mapping where anonymous FreshBooks events were happening in real-time would be a doable visualization project. The result of my hack off was FreshMap, and folks seemed to like it. So much in fact, that we’ve put it up on a 52″ TV in the office kitchen!
We’ve also put a version up on our website, so you can view it here. (Go on, it’s fairly mesmerizing).
How does it actually work?
Technically speaking, FreshMap is pretty simple. It uses the Google Maps API for the map and geocoding, and JQuery to fetch data from the web service, which returns anonymous recent events from FreshBooks that are formatted as JSON (we made this anonymous data feed to power our home page).
If any developers want to check out the source code, you can find FreshMap on GitHub.
Again – check out FreshMap live!
Copyright © 2000-2010
10:50 am
Social comments and analytics for this post…
This post was mentioned on Twitter by MikeMcDerment: The FreshBooks office, sure is becoming neato. Check out our latest decoration: http://bit.ly/76lA4J…
1:00 pm
Sweet! Great idea.
1:15 pm
Now THAT is cool!
4:23 pm
Thats a crazy idea that worked brilliantly.
Nice work.
Another reason, as a geek, I am falling in love with Freshbooks.
9:10 am
Great idea. Brilliant to post it live where everyone in the company can see. Every company should have a visual rep of where and what their customers are doing. Great for focus. What about Google Alerts mashed up to Google Maps. See where people are talking about FreshBoooks. May be trickier but – I dare you.