The God of small things

Ever had a feeling about missing out on small moments and happenings around you? like the one which happen in your immediate vicinity or your most visited places e.g a painting competition for kids in the neighborhood, music event at your favorite hang around pub, a community gathering, exhibition at an art gallery or any of millions of small little things which keep happening, and passing us by.



This is where parhaatkoukut.fi comes into the picture. This is a free map based service which has been created by Ferenc Szekely, an ex-Nokian and previously my colleague (with a little help from me, once in a while). The idea of the service is quite simple, users create info pins on the map about what and where "small things" are happening e.g I just created a info pin for "rantauimakoulu" (swimming classes for kids at my local beach) . I also am a registered user, where I have marked areas on the map which interest me e.g area around my home, Tampere city center etc. When someone creates a pin in my areas of interest, i get notified. (see this as kind of saved searches on many other sites except these been geo tied)

The forum is piloted by an ERDF funded Veto Project run by my wife during Asuntomessut 2009 in Valkeakoski, Finland. "Parhaat Koukut" literally means "Best Hooks" a connotation for best offers, and the service provides a window to "those little things" like events and services to fair visitors.

There are already many map based services and providers e.g here in finland, Google Local Business Center (Google business model driven by access to all today and future data to serve targeted ads) while Eniro, Fonecta the other big players mostly geared towards enterprise/directory listing business models. This mostly leaves spontaneous and "all thing temporal" a gap which in my opinion, parhaatkoukut aims to ease in. I hope someday this will become "God of small things". Give it a try.

I am a happy user mostly (service is in beta status), but then I have been in one way or the other been involved with its creation. The code for the service is targeted to be available as open source.