My friend Annie and I went to a BarCamp over the weekend. I’d never heard of them before, but it wasn’t too hard to talk me into an all night programming event. A BarCamp is sort of like a grass-roots conference where the participants are also the ones who present little mini-modules. This one had an UX application design contest, some speakers from Facebook, and a guy from Amazon. The details on the wiki (and Facebook group, which is where Annie heard about it) were a little sparse,but we understood it to be an overnight programming contest–where you start an app at night and present your results the following afternoon.

Once we got there, though, we found that we could’ve started working on it weeks ahead of time. Whoops. Undeterred, we stayed up all night programming Bike vs Car. This was an idea that I had a couple of weeks ago (after riding my bike for a couple of weeks). I’d like to ride even more than I have been, but motivation has been a little lacking (some days). When I do ride, though, I tend to hop on Facebook to update my status to something like: “I just biked to work!”

I figured I might not be the only one to do that sort of thing (and since FB is still mostly colege students, biking to class is certainly an option), so it might make a great application. I went ahead and registered the bikevscar domain and then just put it on the list of things I wanted to do. The BarCamp seemed like the perfect excuse.

After we got back from the speakers, we spent a few hours reading up on the Facebook API. Eventually we decided to create our app as a standalone, get it working decently, and then integrate with facebook afterwards. I talked my friend into trying out Ruby on Rails, so I spent a little while configuring the server while she did a couple of tutorials. At around 1 a.m, we actually started programming. I did most of the database and backend stuff while she did most of the HTML and CSS (thank goodness… I hate CSS). We got a reasonable facsimile of a social network put together by presentation time (2:00 p.m.), but didn’t actually get any of the facebook integration done (other than loading a splash screen).

The judging was completely crowd-based, and I think we did a pretty good job of selling not just we’d completed–but where the app could go. We won 1st place. The prize was basically a lot of Java merchandise, a bunch of free programming books, and a few other cool things. The fact that we were able to sell a bunch of people on the app tells me it might have some potential if we ever finish it.

Basically, Bike vs Car is a personal tracking application. Rather than focus on other users, our target user is someone who wants to motivate themselves to ride their bike more often. This isn’t necessarily targeted to the spandex-clad guys on $2000 bikes you see riding to work (motivation doesn’t seem to be a problem with them). This will be a tool for the rest of us. There are several major components to the application:

USERS. We allow users to upload a picture, but we don’t really get any info other than their zip code (which we can then use to calculate average gas prices). Because we’re targeting the site for Facebook, we can just graft our functionality into their already robust inter-user network… and we get to focus on just the functionality we want.

VEHICLES. Though there are many types of vehicles, we’re only supporting the two namesakes for now: bikes and cars. Users can upload a picture of their vehicle, list the make and model, give it a name, and (if applicable) enter what kind of gas mileage they get.

ROUTES. Google maps recently added a great feature. You can get directions from one place to another, alter the route as you wish, and then hit “Save this Route.” Rather than just giving you a link (which has been around forever), they now offer you several different sizes of pre-configured embed code to place the map on your own site. So, rather than scrape Google maps ourselves, we just allow the users to post in the embed code for their route, then give the route a name/description and list the mileage.

Users, Vehicles, and Routes. These are the three essential “nouns” for Bike vs Car. The majority of interaction, though, will come from keeping track of which vehicles you take on which routes. To be fair, not every trip you make is a good candidate for a bike ride. We’re encouraging people to only keep track of trips they make that are ~3-5 miles (or less), with only the driver in the car, and where it’s not going to make much of a difference if they show up a little sweaty.

Once you make one of these trips (on a bike or in a car), the users would then log in to our site (or Facebook, which most of them do already). They would be presented with a list of their most common routes (Work, School, Grocery Store) with bike and car icons next to each. Clicking on one will add a tally-mark for that week. The goal (which will likely be rewarded with some sort of token) will be to choose the bike more often than the car (>50%) for a given week. Based on the MPG of your car, the length of your routes, and the area where you live, we’ll be able to generate an estimate of both how much money you’ve saved by biking and how much carbon you’ve spared the environment.

This is something I would find valuable as a standalone application, but making it a Facebook application is even better. Not only would a user be able to track their own bike usage, they’d be able to track how their group of friends are doing. Or how their network is doing. Or how the entire facebook community is doing. Furthermore, instead of logging in to Facebook to update my status, Bike vs Car could automagically create feed events whenever I bike to work (or let me enter an excuse for why I didn’t).

After spending almost 12 hours straight on it, we’ve got a pretty decent prototype in place. The 1st finish place sort of vets the fact people might go for this, so now it’s just a matter of finding some more time to work on it.