Is that a bar in your pocket…?

New sites help direct drinkers to bars

To plan for his Erin Express bar tour, Brent Beddis, a 24-year-old from Philadelphia, printed out a map from MapQuest and marked, in pen, the location of each bar with a circled "A" – "P." The circled letters corresponded to a key at the bottom of the page, where he wrote down the name of each bar and the exact street number. By the end of the night, the page was wet with beer and the ink was smeared.

If Beddis knew about Pubwalk.com, all he would have needed was his cell phone.

On Pubwalk.com, users type in a city or zip code and a Google Map pops up with all the bars in that area already marked with tear drops. Users then select their desired bars, save the map as a URL, and send it as an email to friends, or, upload it onto a Web-enabled cell phone.

"I've heard of uploading maps, but never uploading it onto a phone," Beddis said. "If I knew about that, I wouldn't have had to put so much effort into planning it like I did. The Internet would do all the work."

Each bar on Pubwalk.com pops up as a different colored teardrop based on how well Pubwalk.com users rated it. A red teardrop means the bar is rated a 9, green means an 8, yellow a 7 and so on. Pubwalk.com also gives its users the distance in miles between each bar on their tour, the estimated time of their trip and even the number of people going – based on how many other Pubwalk.com users added the bar to their map.

Mike Barker, 24, of Philadelphia, said he's usually more of a "Park in one place and drink kind of guy," but added he would definitely use the site for an UPenn bar crawl he and his friends sometimes do.

"It would be good, if you're trying to stay ahead of the curve a little, to strategically map your route," Barker said. "Usually we're just wandering around and we end up standing in line for nine hours."

With the use of Google's Dodgeball, users can also create a profile and, when at a bar, send a text message of their location to all of their friends via the Dodgeball network. It also tells any of the user’s friends within 10 blocks where he or she is located.

Pubwalk.com also has an information feature that allows users to select from 55 different criteria, such as live music, dive bar, happy hours, sports bar, etc. to filter a search down to the exact bar atmosphere desired.

"Yeah, I'd definitely use it," said Katie Sedam, 22, Manayunk. "I would like the site because were always trying to find new bars anyway. Or when friends come in, we're always trying to find good bars and we spend most of the time typing all of them in a Google search."

Mark Painter, 23, of Manayunk, who said his friends only made it to one bar during the Erin Express, said they would have been much more likely to leave if they had Pubwalk.com available on their cell phone.

"When you do a pub crawl, unless someone's laid it out for you, or you have somewhere you really need to go, after one or two drinks, you usually end up giving up on it and staying," he said.

"If you had (bar locations) on your cell phone, and you had it in front of you, you'd wind up doing it and making it to new places. I always like to try new bars. It's good to know there's one place to go online to look for new bars, because unless I hear it word-of-mouth, I don't know where to look to find a new place."

-Ainsley Maloney