April 22, 2009 It's not that we've been doing nothing, but most of our recent activity has been behind the scenes or sales oriented. We're picking up the pace on the site a little bit. Today, Hasty changed the search box on the home page to search tags, listings, and places (e.g. streets, addresses, land cover) all at the same time. This is the first step towards merging the "what/where" boxes into a single box. We've been back and forth on this a million times, and probably will continue to do so, but try out the triple search box and let us know how it feels.

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.

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!