Working from home can get a little bit lonely. And at times when loneliness or work or both rises to unsustainable levels, I like to shut my computer down for a moment, put my shoes on and wonder around my neighbourhood. More often than not this leads me to a small residential street in Hackney, just by London Fields. I was always intrigued by the small number of derelict shops that I found there when I first moved into the area. But things have changed: With the opening of Wilton Way Cafe in October 2009 a small eco system of independent shop sprung up. First was Violet Cafe a bit further down near the popular Spurstowe Arms. Then The Other Side of the Pillow opened up just to the left of Wiltons Cafe only to be joined by Toppers of Hackney and Borough Wines to the right earlier this month. The vibrant atmosphere on this little road in Hackney makes some people want to move into the area and I agree it’s a wonderful experience – especially when you had a chance to attend the Wilton Way Street Party for the Royal Wedding weekend! But hold your horses. The Royal Wedding is long gone, and The Duke and his Duchess are back in Wales. Also I heard rumours that you don’t have to walk down Wilton Way to experience London’s new found desire for independence. I am pleased to announce that your personal Wilton Way might also just be around the corner from where you live. I say this with such confidence because I know: I discovered the excellent Independent London Store Guide. Already in its second edition, the book presents over 800 shops, cafes and other establishments, presented with beautiful photographs of the stores and helpful maps to give you a charming guide to the area. I assume you are not surprised that Wilton Way also features.

Further Reading:
Wilton Way Cafe
Violet Cakes
Borough Wines
Independent London

Hello everyone! What an absolute scorcher it is today. We are currently getting ready to send our first ‘Pride Of Whataplan’ email bringing the Whataplan.com content closer to your inbox. We hope this will help you and everyone to enjoy the weather and bonus bank holiday a little bit more. Let us know what you think!

A bit more Whataplan news from our end: The talented Mr. (Dave) Critchley has joined the WhataPlan team and will be making valuable contributions from this point onwards. Welcome Dave! If you have any improvements you would like to see to the site, or just want to say hello, do so at dave (at) whataplan dot com.

Other exciting news: our users have generated a large number of excellent plans in the last month (and we helped out too) so we have now passed the 350 plan mark. Well, done everyone and many thanks for your contributions.
Bye for now,
Matthias

We are FINALLY ready to pull back the curtain on the project and you are one of the first people to see the site. And we’re very excited about this. We hope you are too. (Skip to the end if you just want to know how to log in)

Please login using Facebook or Twitter. This will help you spread the word about the sort of things you like.

Once you’ve logged in, you should:

• Submit your own London secrets.
• Follow other planologists (yes, you’re now a planologist. Congratulations on the new title.)
• Like / Unlike other planologists’ plans

Every planologist who completes each of the above three actions before midnight on Wednesday October 27th will be entered into a draw for dinner for two at lovely little secret restaurant.

Thank you and we hope you enjoy Whataplan!
Matthias and Alan

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PS. Please can you forward this on to your friends. The more the merrier.

PPS. Looking forward to hearing your thoughts. We love feedback! Use twitter (@whataplancom), our FB page, the feedback menu on the site or our email to get in touch.

PPPS. Here are your instructions for using whataplan to start finding something new to do in London.
You can access the site in four simple steps:

1. Go to http://whataplan.com
2. Click on the clock of Big Ben – The signup window will change.
3. Enter your email address and your invitation code (PADDINGTON2010) and hit enter to get access to the site
4. Start making plans!
5. Register to become an official planologist

As much as I love exploring cities, I love the tools which help me to uncover a city: Maps! Luckily we are not the only ones and are excited to see different people producing different maps of beautiful London. We would like to share our favourites with you and kick off with an extract from the Geotaggers ‘ World Atlas by Eric Fisher. Eric produced the pictures by using Flickr locational APIs for over 70,000 pictures and overlayed it on an OpenStreetMap. Enjoy! It’s a beautiful view of London.

You can clearly see that Greenwich in the South East and Kew Gardens in the far West of London are popular places to take pictures. I also think that there are a lot of pictures taken up in Wembley in the North West. Not sure what the cluster that is just north of Canary Wharf is.

Our friends at Flowing Data inform us that trace colours indicate mode of transportation: Black is walking, red is bicycling, and blue is moving by motor vehicle.

Side note: If you have any other beautiful maps geotagged or otherwise we are always keen to look at them!

Our design crew has been busy creating a beautiful draft of the plan page. This is the meaty part of whataplan that will present each of your wonderful plans. Important components are:

• a freely editable plan description
• plan details showing address and displaying it on a map
• the ability to like, dislike and share the plan
• uploading pictures
• ability to comment on plans
• suggestions of nearby plans and other plans that you might like

You will see on the right hand side that you can see which of our fellow planologists (users) also liked the plan opening up the floor for some interaction with like minded users. Yes please!

The way we think WhataPlan is going to be working is that users are going to be looking for a particular activity to do in London. You are the user. You will be choosing a category to make a plan. The question is, what are the right categories to choose from? We are currently thinking that these cover most potential activities:

• Drinking (Pubs & Bars)
• Eating (Restaurants)
• Family Fun (things to do with the kids)
• Listening (Concerts, Reading events)
• Outdoors  (Parks, walks)
• Partying (Clubs, Bars)
• Playing (Games, activities)
• Watching (Theatre, Cinema)
• Extraordinary (unusual things)
• Dating (where to go on a date)
• Cultural (Museums, Concerts)

We will also have a ‘Surprise me’ option in case you’re finding it difficult to know what you are looking for. Do you think we have covered all your bases?

Welcome to the second weekly update from your Whataplan headquarters

Yesterday’s post was nicely important: We presented our vision for WhataPlan! It was a long post and it’s probably easier to share our vision if you see it in front of you. So today…ah, wait there is a mild knock on the door, I better go an answer….guess who that was? It was an interested blog reader who told me to stop talking and just publish the new design of the WhataPlan landing page.  Immediately. No waiting around. So here it is! A big thanks to the guys at SAM IT for the hard work and Michael at The House for comments and guidance:

Landing page design

Click to enlarge the screenshot here:

The interested reader just called: He now wants a bit more background on what we think the user journey is going to be. I told him that I’m not 100% sure what a user journey is but I’m happy to have a go at sharing a few words on what our thinking is. He said that’s pukka. I don’t know what he meant, but this is what I told him:

Components
We think that the most important element of the homepage is the plan creator (the white box with the red stitching). This is where the user’s attention is drawn to. This is where the user chooses the category, the are of London and maybe a time of day for his/her plan which will be generated by hitting the “Make this plan” button.  We are also trying to go for a clean uncluttered design so the content preview columns (popular, recent and featured plans) have been degraded to the bottom of the page so to avoid confusing the user why she visited Whataplan.com: To discover awesome plans!

Generally, our principles in designing continue to be a sketchy and friendly look. We also like yellow.

What do you like about the design? Is it too yellow? What can we do better?

Please have a pleasant weekend!

Best,
Matthias

Whilst we are working away, getting excited about new designs and sweet features that our website should have, it is easy for us to lose sight of the big picture. What are we actually trying to achieve? Why is this project worth losing sleep over? Well, the reason is: We have a vision. And we want to share this vision with you today. Right here. Let’s start right now.

We love London and the feeling that some amazing stuff happens just around the corner never really leaves us. Only sometimes it’s difficult to find out about that cafe that serves coffee like it should be or the small museum that you wish you had known about earlier. Yes, you’re right: there are some well established and quality channels for Londoners to find out about our city but it usually requires you to have some idea of what you are looking for: If you know you want to go to the theatre you turn to Time Out. If you know you want to go to the pub, fancyapint is your friend and if you want to go for a quality meal, one of the many local review sites is trying to make your choice of restaurant easier. What happens if the sun is shining, it might be a Saturday and you have some time on your hands, have itchy feet and all you need is a plan? You turn to What a plan!

The website we have in mind is very simple: you give us some idea of what you might be interested in (i.e. family fun, cultural, clubbing), you can choose in what part of London your plan should be located and decide on a time of day. You hit a button and Whataplan serves up a plan for you! You might like it. Or you hit the button again and make another plan. That way you stumble across London and discover the city one plan at a time.

We also have some extensions of this in mind, but we are still going through some pains to decide what is realistic to do now and what to do later. Watch this space for updates and let us know what you think. And don’t forget: Rome wasn’t build in a day!

This is the end of a long week. What happened over at Whataplan HQ?

As previously blogged we’ve taken down whataplan.com and replaced it with a landing page (thanks again to Michael at The House, ) where you can still sign up for beta testing and some additional insight scoop!

On the development front, we had a first look at the website prototype and played around with some of its functionalities. It works! But we still need to add a good chunk of the components that we have in mind for you and we need to dress it up nicely. Speaking of graphics, we have a new logo. Your feedback is still welcome! We also had some discussions about how the potential landing page might look like (yellow will feature!) and have seen an excellent first draft of one of the main pages of the site. Generally, we are excited by the fact that everything is coming together and we hope to have the courage to share our work with you shortly.

Elsewhere, we have put our social media foot forward, revived the facebook group and entered the world of twitter. We hope to be able to use these channels to talk about the content that we are putting together and are relying on your help to add your own personal London favourites to the mix. Tweet as if there is no tomorrow and when you use the hashtag #whataplan we will be able to pick up your suggestions of nice places in London.

We already have 350 super plans, ranging from “Go and sit on a bench on Parliament Hill” to “Visit the London Metal Exchange open outcry trading floor”! We are now going through the exciting task of populating the content with locational details which is going to keep us busy for some time (if anyone wants to help?).

Please have a good weekend,

Alan and Matthias