Great social recovery site found

I was considering adding some social features to this site. It seems to me the AA fellowship is ripe for its own facebook type site. I looked around a little and didn't find anything that impressed me. Now I know creating a social site is a bunch of work so I looked more and found In The Rooms (www.intherooms.com). There is no way I could do anything this comprehensive so I thought I should promote rather than duplicate.

In The Rooms is impressive and modern. It has most everything I expect in a social recovery site (profiles, friends, messaging, chat, blogs, info, etc) plus a meeting map similar to whereisaa.org. 

No way did I do a thorough search for these types of sites so there may be others just as cool or cooler. If you know of one put it in the comment below.

Anyway, check out In The Rooms and friend me (rdwwdr) while you are there.

Focusing on the Los Angeles area

I've added some areas outside of the LA like Bakersfield, San Diego and Phoenix to this map. In fact I've looked at the CO websites in the largest 50 cities and I guess I can fairly easily input half of them into this map. But I'm getting ahead of myself. At this point no one really uses this map. This is to be expected because I've only told a few people. Before investing time into other areas I need to check if this map has any value to people and will be used.

So, for now I will focus on the LA (including OC, Ventura and Palm Springs) area and have removed the outside areas. I plan to add some depth to the site to provide more value. For example I plan to allow a login where users can select their favorite meetings, comment on them and other user specific stuff.

I also plan on doing some marketing of the site. I've gotten some cards made up and I plan to visit many different meetings and spread the word about the site. I think this site has value but need to make sure others do as well and will use it.

Geolocation added

The site now shows current location if you allow it. If you don't allow the site to know your location then it zooms out and covers a larger area centered on LA.

Visit to Los Angeles Central Office

When I add meetings from a central office I e-mail the office letting them know what I'm doing and ask for feedback. So far the only office to respond has been LA. They invited me down to their monthly business meeting to talk with their db and web guys. I've never been to the CO and it was nice to visit. I learned that there are different standards for what goes on the web vs the printed directory. The printed directory has more meetings than the web but they said they are closing this gap. Anyway my main point was to make them aware of my use of their meeting information and to make sure they were okay with it. They were, stating the meeting information was in the public domain.

If there are other central offices that have feedback, questions or want to be included on this site please leave a note here with some your contact information and I'll contact you.

Welcome to the "Where is AA?" blog. This blog is in support of the site whereisaa.org. This site was born out of my frustration that there wasn't a good online place to see all the meetings in LA on a map. In particular I live between three central offices so the information for meetings around me are in three different websites/directories. So I've pulled the meeting information from most of the central offices in LA and put them on a map. I also pulled the details for all the central offices in the US and put them on the map as well (green icons).

The site is currently a work in progress. I have automated the process and will refresh the meeting information regularly. I pull the data from the central office's websites so it is only as good as they publish. If you see wrong information then make a request for the central office to fix it. I see no value in duplicating their work.

I have a bunch of ideas to make this site better. But right now I'm keeping it simple. I'm focusing on making sure the information is correct, current and easy to get to. The site works best on a computer but works well enough on a smartphone. At some point I'll optimize it for a smartphone as I expect that is how most will want to use it.

I'm glad you made it here and hope you find the site useful. Please leave any comments/questions you have in the comments.