We know for the last couple weeks our site has been a little less than reliable.  We just pushed some changes that will change that and make the site quite a bit faster.  We also added some changes to the way we handle geo-based data , gracias to the crew working on the geo-kit plugin , its been a life saver.  You can now put in a zip code , just don’t be alarmed by the map it goes to argentina even though results are right, its a bug we have to fix.

[Mayan Calendar image courtesy of ReligionFacts.com]

We have been working extra hard on our next version of Evolvist, we are all still here don’t worry.  We’ve never disguised the fact that this is a “nights and weekends” operation, but that’s no excuse for not keeping you all better up-to-date on this blog.  We’re really excited by some new developments (user interface improvements, design enhancements, better, faster, stronger!) and will drop some hints and teases whenever appropriate.   We also apologize for some down time on the site recently. Our servers were not cooperating.

Look for blog posts and updates soon.

On this unseasonably warm winter’s night, we here at Evolvist are proud to invite our friends and family (and anybody else who happens to stumble upon us) into our world of wonder. The email/herald went something like this:

Friends and Family-

At long last, we’ve got a little something to show you that we’ve been talking about for quite some time.
Evolvist.com

You all know what it is, as we’ve likely talked your ear off about it at some point or another. But to recap: it’s a directory of environmentally and socially responsible businesses (and, soon, organizations) in your area. Well, in NYC and SF for starters. We’ll be attacking other cities soon.

We’d love it if you’d step inside, and if you find it comfortable, stay around for awhile–make yourself at home. Start by registering as a user. http://www.evolvist.com/account/signup (The registration form is still quite hideous, we know.) Then you can browse around, look for businesses, add new ones, review others that you know and love (or hate), and edit any of the “eco-labels” or biz info if they’re somehow inaccurate. Also–while we’ve spent countless hours trying to figure out all sorts of categories and relevant eco-labels for every sort of business, we’re sure there will be occasions where something doesn’t quite fit. We implore you to jot down the problem, any suggestions you have, and send them along, to help the directory…ummmm…errrrr……evolve.

Now–this is just the beginning, and there are still flaws. Many we know about, many we’re still rooting out. And we hope you’ll help us in this by trying your hardest to break the site.

For example, we know that….
…for some reason Oakland and Berkeley and other cities surrounding SF are hidden, even though we’ve inputted a bunch of businesses there. No idea why, but we’re working on it.
…it doesn’t really work perfectly on Safari yet. Working on it.
…the “eco-labels” which are the rich data points attributed to various businesses could be confusing to the firsttime user. We’ve got “hovering” descriptions of these that you can see when filtering businesses on a results page to know exactly what they mean, but the hovers aren’t yet working on the “add business” form or within an actual listing. We’re working on that too.
…the “myEvolvist” page is very ugly and basically void of any useful functionality. Yep, we’re on it.
…some of the other “auxiliary” pages (sign up forms and thank you messages, etc) are still rather ugly. We’ve got a designer working on that.
…there are probably 100 other things that aren’t quite right. Which is why we need you, dear friends, to help us make it better.

We hope to launch this to the rest of the world within a month or so. And before we go on blitzing the “green” blogs and start properly heralding it, we’d like it to be in tip-top shape.

For the handful of you outside of NYC or SF–you’re not left out! Our technology allows you to add businesses in your ‘hood that you deem worthy. Please do. We’d love to see how it works in practice for other towns.

For now, we’d ask that you not pass this along too widely. We’d like to keep it in our little circle for a bit. If you’ve got someone in mind, however, who you think just can’t wait to have something like this in their life, and you think they’d have some good feedback and input for how to make it better, please do feel free to send it their way, along w/ my email address so they can reach out to me directly.

Most of all–we hope you find this to be something useful. Something that might actually make “doing the right thing” a bit easier.
Let me know if it works.

You are all wonderful, and we adore you.
Ben, Gail, Marvin and Uri

As you can probably tell, we’ve already rolled our first official pages out and are in the final stages of tweaking. Figure it’s alright to lay it all our there for public scrutiny at this point. We know there’s plenty of work to do still, but we were all anxious to get it out to the public, so that you can get a better sense of what this site will become. Over the next few weeks we’ll be working through a couple of pesky IE bugs, and making some final design and minor functionality tweaks–little annoyances that get us all worked up.

And we’ll start sending it out to family and friends (and if you’re reading this, it’s entirely likely that you fall into that camp.) So while you make your way around the site, please do consider it a work in progress, which it always will be, and your feedback is not only encouraged, but truly sought.

As you can tell, evolvist.com has launched, softly. This is the start. We realize that nothing is perfect (except for you, Mom). So please tell us what you don’t like/really like/would like to see. We want this site to reflect its users and we’re eager to adapt it to your needs. So nothing is too big or too small. Other than that, woohoo! We did it and we are really proud of what we came up with and we hope it’ll be easy and useful.

So to everyone out there, a very happy holiday and new year. We hope this next year will bring great change to evolvist and we hope to share it with you.

The Evolvist Team

Gail, Marvin, Ben, Uri

We are still working ever-so-diligently to launch this site.  We have the highest of hopes that we’ll have something to demo by the holidays, but–to be frank–we’ll all rather hard up for moulah these days and are needing to take on much “proper,” paying work to cover our tails, keep our bellies fed, and make that monthly rent check.  Still, we’re quite happy with this new taxonomy we’ve created that should make finding good, sustainable, and socially-minded goods and services all the easier to find.  It was a masses problem to be solved, but we’re quite happy with how it’s all turned out.  Stay tuned….

He’ll kill me for bringing this up, but our own Community and Outreach Director has got himself on a list:  Interview Magazine’s “Pop A List” of 50 people to watch under 30.

Image to soon follow.  Text goes as such:

BEN JERVEY, 28 With his eco-friendly living guide, The Big Green Apple (Globe Peqot Press), Ben Jervey has helped re-brand environmentalism for hipsters by showing New Yorkers how to further shrink carbon foot prints and still remain cool. Photo: Courtesy of Ben Jervey.

He hates the hipster line.  (In fact, he’s not all that fond of the whole “hipster” thing in general).  But it’s a nice credit to a dude who’s done a bunch in this broadly defined “green scene” and who, more importantly, is on our team.

[Marvin burning the midnight oil.  (Not really, image courtesy of the Guardian.)]

We started working on Evolvist because we felt that this is a resource that we need.  And if we need it so badly, others must as well.  We really believe that it’s something that, when launched and running as we envision it, could be enormously useful and will make it a heck of a lot easier for people to easily live the life that matches their values.

Building this service has always been the priority.  Making money off of it has been but a mere whisp of a thought in the corner of the imagination.  So we haven’t spent a lot of time trying to raise money (to, you know, actually pay ourselves), and as such we’re all gainfully (well, somewhat) employed by others and work pretty silly hours in those other gigs.  Which leaves the nights and weekends, time generally (by the reasonable masses) appropriated to sleep and socializing, to actually try to build this thing.  Which is why we’re tired a lot, and probably don’t post to the blog as much as folks who are able to focus full time on their sites.

It also means that things don’t get done as quickly as we’d like.  We’ve gotten regrettably used to blowing past self-assigned “deadlines” and things taking longer than we’d hoped.  We’ve gotten used to it, but it still drives us nuts.  We’re not sure if this tactic–build Evolvist as a passion project in whatever spare time we can muster–is the right solution, but we’ve felt pretty strongly about doing it this way so far.  So we’ll keep picking away and it’ll get done.  And we can’t wait to show it to you all.  Hopefully by then we’ll have gotten at least one good night’s sleep.

So last week I had the pretty cool privilege of visiting Google’s offices here in NYC. You see, they have this lunchtime lecture series program called Authors @ Google and, feeling the “Earth Week” theme, asked me to come talk about my book and general low-impact living in NYC. A month earlier, I was told by Meghan (one of our very kind liasons there at the Big G), none other than John Hodgeman had spoken. I guess they lowered their standards a bit for some good staff karma or something.

In any case, I brought Marvin along–not only because he’s technically my boss in this whole Evolvist endeavor, but also because I know of nobody who gets more excited about both internet innovations and free food. The google offices offer both of these in copious abundances.

After my talk (to an audience of about 75, most of whom seemed keen and attentive, some even tossing some genuine stumpers my way during the Q&A*), we got a pretty thorough tour of the the entire office space, one floor of which, it should be noted, runs an entire block from 8th to 9th avenue! It was a pretty long tour. The free food is everywhere you turn (as are the razor scooters and enormous orthopedic balance balls), and I was pretty jazzed to find bottles of Kombucha for the grabbing. Now I’m hooked, although a friend of mine far more familiar w/ this enzymic, living beverage (she brews her own!) says I shouldn’t be drinking a whole bottle a day, since it’s like “having a new organ in your body.” Yikes.

And all this is relevant to Evolvist how? Well, for starters it was pretty grand inspiration. Here’s the company behind so much of the web innovation we use everyday, and the peek behind their curtains was damn impressive. Second–we use Google, even rely on it to power our local maps, so it was particularly awesome to get to sit down to lunch (Marvin went back for thirds!) with a coder who spends almost his entire waking life working on Gmaps. And finally–I snuck some Evolvist promo into my presentation, so we’re expecting feedback from all the brainiac Googlers that took notice. And that can’t hurt.

* Ex: Q: “If I buy wind power from my utility, where does the actual power go that I purchase, and won’t the nearby generation plants keep pumping out the same amount of power regardless?” A: It’s complicated.^

^Not my actual answer, which was much longer, rambling, and convaluted.

In the interest of keeping all our ducks in a row (note: our ducks exist only in the metaphorical sense), and our blog as user-affable as possible, we’ll be bundling the posts into a handful of categories. They are, as follows:

The Biz: This is where we bust through that “fourth wall” and give y’all a glimpse of how things are going on our side of cyberspace. You’ll be able to here read about what’s being developed for the site, and probably get some screenshots too. Any real official-type news will drop here first.

Meta: When we blog about our blog. Yeah, we’re so post-modern.

Fieldwork: Here’s where you’ll find what really makes Evolvist tick–from stories that inspire us to cool events and places we’ve found to other worthwhile websites that we steal ideas from we reference. We’ll also use this section to sing the praises of many of our friends and cohorts here in New York–and elsewhere, if we ever remove ourselves from our laptops and travel–who help make Evolvist.com the powerful vehicle that we envision it being.

…will not be televised (but will be blogged): Get it? “The Evolution…” is implied…get it? Um, anyways…In this aggresively titled arena, our writer-in-residence will shower news and spew commentary about our steadying march towards a smarter, more sustainable, more–some would say–evolved society. (Those “some” being us, of course.) Expect many a meditation on such issues of import like carbon taxes, green-tech innovation, or progressive policy and planning. There will likely be some uber-enthusiastic championing of some underreported, yet heartening, developments in the environmental movement, and you’ll definitely find regular dispatches from the front lines of NYC’s own “evolution,” as it moves ever-more-deliberately to the center of the urban sustainability movement. It will, graciously, be light on overt criticism and outright condemnation of the stubborn, archaic systems that we’re working away from.

Of course, it’s entirely possible that these categories will change over time. We’ll be sure to let you know when and why. In the “Meta” category, clearly.