My amazing co-worker (@NickyBalls) is link for link the best sharer I know. Whatever he sends out is worth clicking, and an hour ago, he sent out a link to this listing of 101 Best Sandwiches in NYC put together by Grubstreet/New York Magazine.
It's 2pm. I haven't had lunch. I'm hungry. I want a sandwich. I go to this "listing" and find that it's a pageview-scamming slideshow. Son, I don't want to flip through sandwiches. I want to eat them! A sandwich shop is a decision, so the content should be organized to help me make that decision. I want a map, or I want an app, or I want both. I want a sandwich dammit!
I want to fire up my mobile phone or tablet browser or even website on my laptop, and I want to say "Find my location. Now find the closest delicious sandwiches from this listing."
In order to actually find the address of the sandwich vendor, the Grubstreet slideshow forces you to click to yet another page under the "See the Listing" link at the end of each slide writeup. Utterly useless! I don't even know how the list is organized. Apparently it's ranked, so if I want the 48th best sandwich in New York, I just need to click 48 times or so, and I'm there.
I don't think an app just for this listing makes any sense, but it certainly does make sense as a module within an existing app. But even an app is probably going too far, especially for the iPhone with the need to learn janky ass Objective C and appease the iTunes App Store approval gods. No, I'd be happy enough if NY Mag released the list as an actual list (spreadsheet even?), and there are enough tools (or people (who are sometimes tools, but I digress)) to pull the address/location data from the street info and create a Google Maps layer. An API would be even better (see: Mashery). Give me an API and a bunch of geeks with time, and I'll solve every first world problem known to man, and maybe even a few second world ones.
So this is a really long way of asking: would someone please make a Google Maps search result with all these sandwich places on them? Or is there some other process I can invoke that will convert this useless, non-satiating slideshow into something actionable? I have 45 minutes until my next meeting.
Let's go Internet! Clap, Clap, Clap-Clap-Clap