This one actually has a reason: it takes a lot of effort to contact small business and get offers from them. Remember, once Postabon catches on it can rely on users uploading offers, but right now, at the start, smanek has to do it all by himself.
See https://developer.mozilla.org/en/using_geolocation for some details
How would you prefer we degrade if there is no content in your area?
You're a Lisp shop, there should be a continuation/condition-system based error handling mechanism that teleports the user to NYC. NewLisp has a WITH-NEW-JERSEY macro.
If there's nothing in the detected area, can you move to the closest bon instead?
If I'm going to be showing deals not near you, I'd rather be showing great deals from 200 miles away than poor ones from 50 miles away.
In steady state, we'd definitely do some sort of 'show nearest deal' instead though ...
If some startup would actually make anything, literally anything that was global, I'm sure it would get a segment of a market that nobody's utilizing.
edit: And a Javascript alertbox letting you know you're going to see new york instead... That's not helpful.