Introducing KivaVision

There are so many cool things to be done with the Kiva website. When we get around to doing them, with all the backend/site-maintenance/money-transferring tasks that typically take higher precedence, it's an extremely gratifying experience. A few weeks ago, Jeremy expressed this when he posted about the maps feature he built in his spare time.

Now Noah, Kiva's newest engineering hire, has gone in and extended the maps functionality to work on lender pages. This has been one of our most commonly requested features, so to see this come to life is definitely exciting.

To top that all off, we're now happy to introduce KivaVision. KivaVision came from a conversation we had with a Kiva supporter some weeks ago. She was talking about cool sites on the web, and she showed us TwitterVision, a site that integrates maps with the Twitter Micro-blogging application real-time. As soon as we saw it, we all reacted the same way: "Whoa! We should build that on Kiva!"

So, we did. Actually, Cory, a former Kiva engineering intern and current volunteer, built it for us. He's made a way to show the "I loan because" text for Kiva's most recent lenders in a map-based format. It's extremely cool, and is unfortunately one of those things that can distract you for long spans of time.

If you get a chance, you should check it out: http://www.kiva.org/kivavision

And if you end up spending too much time staring at it, blame Cory.