From TechCrunch today. This type of service could prove useful to Front Porch Forum users to share documents among neighbors.
Docstoc is designed to be a shared repository of commonly used forms and documents… Docstoc competes with Scribd… Today, Docstoc is coming out of its private beta into a public beta. Anyone can now upload and share documents. Already, there are 12,000 documents on the site. There is no limit to how many you can upload, and Docstoc accepts the following file formats: .doc, .xls, .ppt, .rft, and .pdf.
YourStreet.com is launching. From TechCrunch…
What do you get when you combine Google Maps with hyper-local news and comments? You get a map-based news site called YourStreet… [it] detects where you are located and serves up news stories about events that recently occurred in your city or neighborhood, as well comments from YourStreet members who live nearby.
The startup has developed an algorithm that extracts geographical information from stories, such as street names, neighborhoods, and cities. It then geo-codes the articles against a longitude and latitude database so that it can place them on a map… If he can attract enough local visitors to YourStreet, the local dry cleaner may also want to show up to advertise there. The localized ads will be simple text ads at first, but they could also eventually be push pins of a different color.
YourStreet has been self-financed so far by Nicholson to the tune of about $400,000. His last company, Netventures, was sold to CNET in 1999 for about $12 million.
Interesting traffic numbers for social networking sites on TechCrunch today. Lots of interesting comments. My first take-away… loads of options for online social networking and more flooding onto the web every day.
It’s not about features, it’s about who’s already there and tone. The internet is overflowing with social networks for (1) snarky techno-types, (2) pop-culture-obsessed kids (i.e., college age on down), and (3) career-focused climbers in a few industries. For the rest?
I just learned from TechCrunch that Judy’s Book is dead…
We just got word from Judy’s Book founder and CEO Andy Sacks that the Seattle startup will be shutting down operations, and most of the staff of twelve was let go today. The company had raised a total of $10.5 million over two rounds of financing. Judy’s Book started off as a community driven review site for local businesses, but changed it’s focus in 2006 when the original model looked to be failing. The company de-focused on local reviews, and went more towards the shopping angle and local deals.
Other players in the local review space have fallen in the last year, too. Intuit shut down Zipingo last summer, and Insider Pages sold for little more than the capital it originally raised to CitySearch. Yelp is still standing and reportedly doing well, although fierce competition from Yahoo and Google as well as younger startups is looming.
Front Porch Forum does a booming business in our pilot community with local reviews… but with a very different take.
Bob Tedeschi wrote in the New York Times today about LifeAt, meettheneighbors.org and i-neighbors.org… three services taking aim at online social networking for neighbors. About LifeAt (see my recent post)…
Matthew Goldstein, LifeAt’s chief operating officer, said the company is only now completing its advertising strategy. For now, the company, based in Brooklyn, is surviving on the roughly $6,000 it receives from each building that signs up for the service. It does not charge the buildings yearly fees.
More than 335 buildings have joined since LifeAt began in March. About 600 more buildings are scheduled to introduce LifeAt Web sites by year’s end. The company does not currently share ad revenues with the buildings, but Mr. Goldstein said that could change.
Among buildings with LifeAt Web sites, Mr. Goldstein said, residents of 64 percent of the units have created personal pages. Property managers, who give residents login and password information, also use the sites to post news about maintenance work and vacancies.
And about meettheneighbors.org…
Since late 2004, MeetTheNeighbors.org, a for-profit company based in Manhattan, has operated a social networking service for apartment dwellers.
That site, which is free, has about 15,000 users, and last year began serving residents of Boston, London and Dublin. Jared Nissim, the company’s founder, runs the site as a sidelight.
Mr. Nissim said some buildings have considerably more active Web sites than others, thanks mostly to the efforts of volunteers in the building who are responsible for managing the content of the site. “It may be one of the flaws of our system that it relies on one primary contact to get the ball rolling,” he said.
The meettheneighbors site reports 2,204 buildings set up with 11,621 members… about five people per building.
And i-neighbors.org…
I-Neighbors continues to grow, with 45,000 people now using the free service.
I seem to recall that this service hosts about 5,000 neighborhood groups across North America. That’s a lot of people… although averaging 9 people per group.
About 25% of Front Porch Forum‘s pilot city has subscribed via word of mouth. Our average neighborhood forum has about 50 households.
An interesting article in the Business 2.0 finale this month about Marchex.
Marchex CEO Russell Horowitz is launching websites for thousands of cities, big and small. The play? To beat Microsoft, Google, and Yahoo to the punch in connecting businesses to nearby customers.
With smart people, powerful tools, and hundreds of millions of dollars behind it, I’m sure that this effort will produce something of value… in fact it already has. But I wonder about “soul”…
Marchex is having a hard time selling its vision. Since so many of its sites sat idle for so long, packed with nothing but ads, Marchex looked like a giant domain play except with much higher overhead. But the company has been developing new technologies. And in June, Marchex lit up 100,000 of its sites – with another 150,000 or so to go – changing them into destinations with a smattering of content and reviews. The goal is to create sites that, as Horowitz puts it, “have a soul.”
In May 2006, for example, Marchex bought a review site called OpenList, a local guide that pulls together reviews for restaurants, hotels, and local attractions. The company then developed software that crawls the Web, sorts out duplicate content, and then generates a review. Look up San Francisco’s Hotel Triton on BayAreaHotels.com, for instance, and the software-generated write-up reads like a Zagat guide: “What travelers said they loved: ‘The location,’ ‘the staff,’ and ‘the room.’ Guests can enjoy yoga and other local activities.” Users add their own reviews too.
Hmm…
Ghost of Midnight is an online journal about fostering community within neighborhoods, with a special focus on Front Porch Forum (FPF). My wife, Valerie, and I founded FPF in 2006... read more