June 27, 2008 Povo is a Creative Commons work, meaning you can take our content and reuse it for free as long as you give us attribution. Because of this, we generally try to "internalize" anything in Povo, such as images, so that you can be sure the work is "complete." We still think this is a goal, but we also have to be realistic. For example, you can embed You Tube videos, but we don't load them into our database. This is partly because we consider YouTube a "stable" content reference: they're unlikely to go out of business anytime soon. Today, we have also created a "super template" (templates that use things like Javascript or special server code) for embedding RSS feeds. The original intent is for things like news stories or blog entries which are not meant to be searchable or persistent on Povo. For example, here's this page as a feed in itself: Or a feed of news stories purporting to be about the Back Bay (from [1]):

July 1, 2008 Povo is an ever-evolving guide to Boston, and obviously it's very early in our lifetime. So we know there are times when we might not have a listing, or our text search doesn't understand some crazy misspelling (this is a really hard problem, if you are a Lucene expert, contact us!). So we've added Google Local Search results to our search results page. If you get no results from us, we'll automatically run the Google search. If you get some results, you have the option to run the Google search at the bottom of that page. We hope this gives you even more reasons to go to Povo first.

April 27, 2009 You probably were only marginally aware you had a member page (www.povo.com/~yourpovoname). We have lots of work to do to make that an interesting place to put relevant information about yourself, but I guess we have to start somewhere. I (djMax) wanted to put the music I'm listening to on my page, so I added the [1] widget as a template. Very simple usage:

{{Povo:Secure Templates/LastFm | Username = whatever}}

See the example at right.

October 2, 2008 In a perfect world, Povo would be accessible on any device, anywhere. We're not there yet because we're just not big enough to have the resources to write for every mobile device, etc. But we did just expose some basic services to mobile devices via email. To use these services, append "@povo.com" to the addresses listed below:

• photos - attach a photo and it will automatically upload it to your member images. If you include the name of a listing in the subject, it will automatically add the image to the gallery for that listing! If it can't find one, no worries, you can go to [Special:Orphaned/Images|the orphaned images] page and add them later.
• search - include your search in the subject line, such as "pizza near Appleton Street" or "park in South End" and Povo will email you back the top 5 search results and a link to more information.

The search interface is also exposed via Twitter, so you can direct message Povo on Twitter with a search specified as in the email version and well reply with a super short collection of results. (Usually only 3 fit the 140 character limit of twitter). And even niftier, if you use Twitterific or another client that lets you add your location to your tweets, we'll use that as a location from which to search. So this tweet:

http://maps.google.com/?q=42.346469%2C-71.069264&ll=42.346469%2C-71.069264 kid friendly

Would do a search around our offices for kid friendly things. Remember to befriend/follow Povo first, or it can't reply to your messages. More ideas for email-based services are welcome!