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San Dimas Blog
Archive - May 2007
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Auction for the First San Dimas Beta Invitation

Posted May-28-07 23:48:35 PDT
The first beta invitation for San Dimas is up for auction right now. San Dimas is entering beta soon, and if you win this auction, you will get it first. This is for the Alpha-Geek who has everything!

Auction Includes:
  • First invitation to the San Dimas beta program
    Will be sent out at least 6 hours before any other user gets an invitation. Exact timing of when the invitation gets sent out is not guaranteed, but we promise the winner won't have to wait too long.
  • Official looking certificate
    Provides documented proof that you are in fact the first San Dimas user. Certificate will be signed by me, and by a real life eBay executive, if I'm successful in convincing one to do so.
  • "Preston/Logan '08" XL size T-ShirtSorry, no other size is available. I
    bought this on eBay, of course, and if all you want it the shirt I'm sure you can use your eBay search skilz to find another one just like it. I will also sign the t-shirt (additional fee may apply for me to not sign the shirt).
More details on the auction page. You can also grab an eBay togo widget from my personal blog (too bad eBay blogs doesn't allow embeds -- Hey Nii, can we fix that?)

-Alan
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The Mystery Behind the Name "San Dimas"

Posted May-22-07 08:57:24 PDT
My name is Adam Trachtenberg, one of the people working on Project San Dimas.

One of the questions I often hear when speaking about Project San Dimas is: "Why is San Dimas called San Dimas?" Good question. So, I thought I'd let everyone into the answer.

At eBay, we like to use code names for products before they go live. At the time we started working on San Dimas, there was another product nicknamed "Baldwin Park".

If you don't live in Southern California, Baldwin Park is a suburb of Los Angeles. So, when trying to come up with a name for this project, Alan decided to look at neighboring LA towns -- and came across "San Dimas."

San Dimas, of course, is the hometown Bill S. Preston, Esq. and Ted Logan, best known for their work in the band "Wyld Stallyns."

That's right, it's a reference to "Bill & Ted's Excellent Adventure", that great work of late 80s cinema, and the first movie with Keanu Reeves that anybody ever saw.

Be excellent to each other and party on dudes.

-adam
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Feature Highlight: Popular Searches In Search Box

Posted May-17-07 11:16:35 PDT

I promised that I'd blog about features in San Dimas, and the first one up is very simple. In the search box, when you start typing a few characters, a drop-down menu appears showing popular searches that match.

PopularKeywords

This has a few benefits - one is that if you happen to be looking for something that is on the list, you can click directly on it and save time. But what I like it for best is for finding stuff to buy that I didn't even know that I needed. The other day I found "cushman" was one of the top "cu" keywords. If you are not familiar with Cushman utility vehicles, you may be surprised what you find when you search for it.

San Dimas is not the first application to have this kind of feature, but we are looking in a few areas to improve on the basic model of showing popular searches in this way. The first is integrating a user's own past searches in the same drop down as the general purpose popular searches. We are toying around with various ideas on how to do this. The main question is whether to have a single merged list or to have a single list that intermixes personal with popular search terms. This is the kind of thing that is hard to form an opinion on until you see it in action, and even I won't be sure which I prefer until it is actually implemented in the product. Leave a note in the comments with your thoughts.

-Alan

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