Show HN: We Just Re-Launched BurningManRides.com for 2012

http://burningmanrides.com/?2012

by jasonshen • 14 years ago

71 18 14 years ago

stkrzysiak2• 14 years ago

Cool, I've always wondered why there is nothing like this for general rides. Why niche on burning man, why not a general ride board?

ricksta• 14 years ago

I believe it's the same guys running RideJoy, which is a YC company

stkrzysiak2• 14 years ago

N/M, after scrolling down I saw the burning man ticket giveaway by ride joy, who seem to offer that service: http://ridejoy.com/

jasonshen3• 14 years ago

Hey stkryzsiak - funny you should mention that. The company behind BurningManRides.com, Ridejoy (where I'm a co-founder) is something like a "general ride board".

We make it easy and fast to match with friendly people going your way. We're mostly on the West Coast right now but growing quickly. Check us out at: http://ridejoy.com

sadga2• 14 years ago

http://sfo.craigslist.org/rid/

cocoflunchy• 14 years ago

In France / Europe we have http://covoiturage.fr / http://blablacar.com which is pretty popular (2 million members in Europe it seems).

Ridejoy doesn't look like they're working that well... maybe a cultural difference?

jrzhang• 14 years ago

I can imagine some pretty interesting car rides with Burning Man regulars.

bravura• 14 years ago

Are you concerned about the BORG making a trademark claim? They are very protective of the trademark.

jasonshen3• 14 years ago

I think it really depends on the service. We've always been upfront with the Burning Man organization about what we're doing and we don't make any kind of profit on the site. Given that it definitely provides value for their attendees, we've been in their good graces so far.

Spoom• 14 years ago

Your descriptions are in a very light grey against a white background; nearly invisible, consider increasing the contrast. Other than that, looks useful.

jasonshen3• 14 years ago

Thanks for the feedback. It's a careful tradeoff between scannability (when browsing, you don't actually want that description text too visible) and readability (when you settle in on a ride you ARE interested)

Having said that, we're going to try making that text slightly darker and see if that makes the overall experience better.

sadga2• 14 years ago

Mouseover on an entry should make the grey foreground darker, instead of making the white background darker.

If you are going for scannability, repeating "Sign up to see if you have any mutual friends on Facebook" in bold blue on every entry is hurting you much worse.

jayliew• 14 years ago

Go RideJoy - amazing team!

scarmig• 14 years ago

Indeed. I've only met Kalvin and Jason, but really great, smart people (though, remember to always read the latter's blog with a very open and generous mind =) )

venturebros• 14 years ago

I've noticed this and RideJoy is filled with dummy accounts. What happens when someone wants to use the service and tries to get a ride from one of those dummy accounts?

18pfsmt• 14 years ago

I'd seen RideJoy mentioned on HN several times, but didn't check it out until now. It wasn't obvious to me that there were dummy accounts, so could you show me some?

I also decided to check out craigslist listings in my area, which led me to find zimride (which I believe helped someone on their site auto-post to craigslist, which it looks like RideJoy will do as well). It's an interesting niche, which I'd never really considered before as I was a hitchhiker many years ago.

This whole idea caused me to call my trucking buddy to see if he could make some extra money with something like this. Turns out, his insurance premium would increase by $100/yr if he allowed riders, and he never thought it would be worth it because he thinks craigslist is sketchy. He thought this might be more palatable with FB integration (he still uses FB against my advisement).

ridejoy• 14 years ago

Interesting, we've read a lot of untrue things about us in comment threads before, but this is a first :) we've never created dummy accounts/posts before (though we know it worked well for Reddit! <3 Alexis).

Can you reply here or email us at team at ridejoy and let us know what posts you're talking about? Much appreciated!

(We currently don't even let users post rides without a photo, so I'm racking my brain to figure out what you're thinking are dummy accounts...)

ericingram• 14 years ago

http://zimride.com is great too.

Show HN: We Just Re-Launched BurningManRides.com for 2012

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