The problem that I’ve been thinking about recently is that I’d like for people to be able to save their lists of favorite apartments and easily send them to their friends, brokers, etc. The two main approaches that I’ve been debating between are whether I should implement full-fledged accounts with usernames and passwords for those that want to do more than just browse, or go a more lightweight route, by asking only for an email address, and immediately emailing them a link that, when clicked, will reconstitute their list. This link could then be passed around and would represent a list that could modified by anybody.
I’d like to go the link route, because I hate signing up for accounts just to use one or two features that really shouldn’t require an account, and I hate giving one of my passwords to yet another sketchball website (not that PadMapper is one of those).
On the other hand, at some point I would like to make it possible for people to post their own rooms for rent on here, and for that, I doubt that emailing an accessor link is secure enough for most people’s tastes, especially if I wanted to ask for a bit of money for the posting.
In the end, I think I’ll implement the link-email method for quick and dirty favorite-list saving, and then I can tie in a more robust system of recalling favorites with an account system, when I make that for the purposes of people posting their places directly on PadMapper.
Why don’t you use the Tiny URL scheme, where you provide a Tiny URL, or something like it (like the YouTube video ID), that gives users a link to a collection stored on your server. That way, all they need to do is email a link to someone and that can be used to edit.
It’s not all that secure – but hey – who’s interested in the houses you’re looking at anyway.
Hey Roy, thanks for the feedback. That’s basically what I ended up doing – on the top of the favorites list, there’s a save link, which emails you a summary list of the apartments in your list and a link that brings you to PadMapper with that version of the list loaded up. It’s definitely not very secure, but like you said, there’s not much room for abuse anyway (the saved lists aren’t editable – they need to be saved again). On the flip side, it makes it very easy to share lists just by emailing the link.
Didn’t see an email to send this to. The design section seemed like the best place to leave this feedback. I tried viewing padmapper on my ipad the other day and it did not let itself to the interface of the ipad very well. The big issue was with the sliders. You can’t actually slide them. You had to click where on the slide bar you wanted the tab to be, and couldn’t get a very pin pointed option.
In general I love this site. It is exactly what I have wanted for years!