A MapAList Milestone - 5000 Users!

Roughly 18 months ago we launched MapAList with no publicity whatsoever. Brian, our founder, head developer, and resident visionary, shared his excitement around the solution with friends and family triggering our user base to slowly begin growing.

Within a few months a handful of publications picked up on the simplicity and utility of MapAList and started to help us spread the word. LifeHacker.com was one of the first and gave us a huge boost. A week or so later The Chicago Tribune, The Orlando Sentinal, and The Baltimore Sun featured MapAList in their "How 2" column and things really started to heat up.

From churches and wine distributors to real estate agents and news organizations, our users were finding creative and unique ways to make the most of MapAList.

International press soon followed with articles in Russian, Indian, and French publications just to name a few. An influx of Brazilian users soon made us aware that we had been featured in Info Exame (a highly-popular Brazilian technology magazine). Users all over the world were leveraging MapAList to visualize their lists and share them with their own user bases on the web.

On March 14th, 2009 at 9:53 AM Eastern time, our 5000th user created an account and began visualizing his lists using MapAList.

This marked an incredible milestone for the MapAList team. Thank you all for your enthusiasm around our solution and your excellent questions, comments, and ideas that ultimately make MapAList better.

Also, thank your for your donations - they are much appreciated and help keep our free service afloat. Please keep them coming...

--The Map Commissioner (E-mail)

Taking your Maps to the Next Level

As our user count has steadily grown, the MapAList support team has received an increasing number of calls and e-mails from users looking to do more with our solution. Over 80% of the feature requests we’ve received are, well, features that already exist within the base MapAList solution. What does that tell us? What it tells me is that we need to do a better job articulating the feature set MapAList has to offer out of the box...and that’s exactly what we’re going to do. For the next several weeks we will be publishing installments of Taking Your Maps to the Next Level – a series of short tutorials meant to enable you, the user, to get more out of MapAList. Each installment will focus on a single feature, show examples of both spreadsheets and maps, and provide step by step instructions to make it work. Here’s the current plan… 01/02/09 – Basic Grouping to Show Differentiation 01/09/09 – Advanced Grouping to Show Differentiation 01/16/09 – Adding Hyperlinks to Your Map Points 01/23/0...

New Video Tutorials (Updated)

We decided to experiment and create some video tutorials in the hope they might be more effective instruction and better at getting the word out about what features exist in mapalist and how to utilize them. We hope you find value in the first few we put out. Creating your First Map Using Custom Icons Starting from an Excel Sheet Editing your Maps, Post-Creation Syncing your Map and Google Sheet

Allow your Member/User Base to Add Pins to your Map Using Google Forms

As the MapAList user base has grown over the past couple of years, one of the things we’ve noticed is that we have a ton of organizations leveraging our toolset to map their member/user bases. Religious organizations use MapAList to track their congregations; alumni associations use MapAList to track their members; campaigns and non-profits use MapAList to track their supporters/donors…you get the point. The reason I bring this up is because a few of these organizations have gotten smart and realized that they could push the work of updating their maps out to the user based directly using Google Forms. It’s like self check-out at the grocery store – the users love it because they are empowered (and because it’s a novelty to scan those barcodes) and so does the store because it reduces labor. Sounds cool – right? Well, implementing such a solution on your site with MapAList is not terribly difficult. Those folks at Google have made Google Forms easy to design and feed to a G...

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