It also badly needs proximity based search. People don't find me unless they enter Berkeley in the location field, so I'm stuck between listing San Francisco for more hits or Berkeley for more accuracy.
Its a text based search and I'm working on some simple query expansion to resolve SF / Bay Area / San Francisco type queries as the same. There are still a few open questions for implementing proximity search ...
A simple approach is to just geocode all the locations to a lat/lon and do a proximity search using WGS84. If someone has a location entry in their profile that fails geocoding, put up a warning the next time they login telling them that their location was not resolved and they should update it.
Don't worry about queries like "SF" or "Bay area"... if it's not good enough for the geocoder to resolve the location, just return an error message.
Is there a way to claim my listing on the site and edit it?
Edit: Nevermind I found a way. Go to login, and click "forgot password". Enter the email address you entered as contact info on the spreadsheet. A password reset link will be emailed to you and you can then use that to login and claim and edit your profile.
I did receive a few error messages when editing my profile. They just said that the owner of the site had received a notification and to check product.log It happened when I was attempting to edit my rate.
After a few tries it worked. I think it might have been related to entering too much text in the rate field, because when I shortened my explanation it worked just fine.
I didn't enter any data on that spreadsheet on what my skills are etc (I was/am not really looking for work,just entered my user id for the heck of it) but still got a few emails looking for technical founders. Nothing very interesting/significant though.
EDIT: It looks like my entry isn't there any longer. :)
Note: I'm not the author. Just noticed some traffic coming via this to my personal site (http://dailytechnology.net) and originally intended to post it to see any comments associated.
I created the original sheet (and have hired and attempted to hire from it). As I said then, I don't love the bifurcation of data - I don't think that this author is updating the data back, or even when it was updated - but I'm not sure if I can do anything about that.
This is a very awesome app. The basic info/links section in the edit project page should be expanded by default. Not to be negative but I don't see how I'll get any benefit from this. Very few startups are located in my area and on a cursory glance, my skill-set is pretty common. I guess that also means I need to expand my skills.
Seems like this is similar to the Google spreadsheet I posted some time ago - except it was oriented towards co-founder matchmaking http://cofoundergoogledocs.com
I'm curious as to why you're not using Gravatar for the profile photos. Given that a lot of people signing up already have a Gravatar account it would probably make sense.
Also, on the 'Edit profile' page it would probably make more sense to have the forms displayed by default rather than hidden.
While it usually annoys me when people reuse data like that when posted on the web, I have to say Kung Fooey, you did it exceptionally well and you made it extremely easy and painless to "claim" my data. Thanks for the good work.
