A Great Mobile Application
I ran into a reference to GasBuddy in a Reuters article called Drivers Wage High-Tech Fight on Fuel Prices. For example, a list of gasoline station prices in Denver. I'd expected this to be an article on new fuel-saving technologies, but in fact, it's about finding the cheapest price. The interesting thing is that reported prices are removed after 72 hours, so the site relies on contributors to report update prices regularly. This seems like the perfect target for a mobile application; not only can you try to look up the cheapest gasoline near you, but you can also report prices as you encounter them. I have no idea if GasBuddy is usable via a cell phone's browser, but it seems like the perfect application for a mobile device. The social implications of this site are interesting, as well; GasBuddy is driven entirely off of its community of "price watchers". I wonder how this could be extended to other retail items. Would it be useful to shoppers to have similar comparisons for, say, groceries?
Now, GasBuddy has some shortcomings, for example, it would be nice to have a way to give it a location (maybe a GPS reading) and have it give you an ordering weighted by proximity instead of strictly by price. Clearly, you'd need to come up with some sort of tradeoff; the question is how far is it worth driving to save 5 cents on a gallon of gas? In my case, the closest, cheapest gasoline to my house is 15th on the list, it's simply not worth saving 2 cents a gallon to drive the few extra miles to get the cheapest gas available. Still, this listing is useful even when you're not intent on getting the cheapest price; I'm often faced with needing gasoline and having to decide whether a given location is way above the norm. The data from GasBuddy could derive a minimum, maximum, and average reported price to give a driver guidance on how far a vendor is out of line with the best and average available prices