YourStreet Blog

Changes at YourStreet

This weekend you'll be seeing a lot of changes at YourStreet:

• New layout.  The first thing you'll notice is that we removed the news map.  Supporting mapping of each article was just too expensive to maintain, but rest assured that you'll continue to find the latest local news for your city or town on YourStreet.  As an added bonus, you'll find the pages load much faster than before.

• Profile changes.  We have decided to no longer support user profiles on YourStreet and, as a result, all user data has been deleted.  Recently it's become clear that pretty much everyone has a Facebook profile and it no longer makes sense to force users to maintain separate profiles on each site they join.  So YourStreet now integrates with your Facebook profile.  When you comment on an article you'll see the option to login using your Facebook credentials.  You can also choose to have the comments you leave at YourStreet appear on your Facebook profile.  So with one click you can let all your friends know what you're thinking!

• Discussions.  While you can continue to comment on articles, YourStreet has discontinued discussions, at least for now.  We're hoping to re-introduce this feature in the near future.

• Related articles.  For every article on YourStreet you'll now find other stories related to that subject.  This allows you to explore a topic in more depth than before.

• More topic pages.  For every location that YourStreet covers, we now have pages that will show you articles about business, crime, entertainment, health, politics, sports or technology in that area.  We don't yet have content for every topic in every location, but we're working on it.

• More entities.  Before, YourStreet provided news about your location.  Now we have expanded to show you news related to local landmarks, events, and companies.  You'll be able to find more information about more stuff on the new YourStreet.

• Better search.  Now that YourStreet covers a lot more information, we've made it easier for you to find what you're looking for.

We hope you'll visit the new YourStreet to see these changes in action.  Please let us know what you think by commenting here or using the feedback form linked to at the bottom of every page.

Thank you for being a part of our community!

The YourStreet Team

Add News to Your Map with YourStreet's API

We're very pleased to announce the beta launch of YourStreet's shiny new API.  The YourStreet API lets you easily display geocoded news articles in your own application. You provide us with a bounding box consisting of latitude/longitude points and we return all the recent news articles we have collected for that location.

YourStreet has built a database of millions of geocoded articles for tens of thousands of locations across the United States. We add thousands of new articles everyday. The API lets you plug into this data and use it in any way you want.

The YourStreet API is perfect for any map mashup – for example you could display our news articles alongside real estate listings to give your customers more information about the area. You could also use the API to display a list of relevant news headlines for any location.

You don't need an API key to get started and we have kept our Terms of Service simple and straightforward.

The first application created with the YourStreet API is BlockRocker.us. Visit the site to see what some of the possibilities are when plugging in to our data.

Full documentation on the API can be found at yourstreet.com/api.  Check it out and let us know what you think

Add Your Local Blog to YourStreet

If you write a blog about your city, town, neighborhood, church, school, or anything else local, you can now add it automatically to YourStreet.  Having your content appear on YourStreet gives you broader exposure and helps drive new readers to your blog or website.

Just click on the "Add Your Blog to YourStreet" link in the right sidebar towards the bottom of the page (you'll need to be logged in to your YourStreet account to do this).  You'll then be able to move a pin on the map to specify where you write about.  Once you fill in the information on the form, your blog will be added to our system within a few days.  Then whenever you publish a post that mentions a specific location, we'll automatically pick it up and place it in the right spot on YourStreet.

Add your blog to our site today and share your local insights with the entire YourStreet community.

YourStreet Presents at Tonight's WebMap Social

YourStreet will be one of the companies presenting at tonight's Web 2.0 Mapping and Social Networks Group Meetup at Google headquarters in Mountain View.  For more information on the event, check out the Meetup page: http://www.meetup.com/webmapsocial/.

The event will also be streamed live on Ustream.tv.  Search WebMapSocial on Ustream.tv to find the channel.  So if you can't make it in person, check it out online.

Find Weird News on YourStreet

Ever wonder what the strangest auctions on eBay look like?  Do you know where to go in Los Angeles to eat scorpions, crickets, ants and worms?  Did you hear about the county in upstate New York that put Barack "Osama" on its absentee ballots?

Each day we find strange news items like these and now they are all collected in one place: the Weird News section of YourStreet.  Go to any location on YourStreet and on the lower left of the page you'll find our shiny new Weird News module.  You can even add this content to your blog or website just by clicking a link.

Now you can tune in to YourStreet not just to get your local news, but to get your weird news too.

Introducing the Article of the Day

Today we launched a new feature on YourStreet: the Article of the Day.  Each day our staff combs through the thousands of local articles we collect and picks one that is of general interest or just plain wacky.  You'll find it in the upper right corner of every page, so it's hard to miss.

Today's article of the day is: Countdown to the VP Debate.  So next time you stop by YourStreet, check out the Article of the Day and join the conversation!

YourStreet Launches Top-to-Bottom Redesign

After many months of development work, we are very pleased to unveil a complete redesign of the YourStreet website.

We've revamped everything - from our logo to page layout - to improve ease-of-use and to reduce visual clutter. We've taken the best suggestions from our community and made extensive improvements to the way news and features are organized, enabling users to find the exact information they are seeking quickly and easily.

Some of the highlights of the redesign include:

• Innovative drag and drop interface for adding content to the map.  YourStreet is the first website to allow users to simply drag a pin onto the map to add content to it.  Try dragging a user profile pin onto the map to see how easy it is to register.
• User generated content is highlighted on the right side of every page.  Local discussions and neighbor activity is given new prominence on the site, emphasizing user contributions.
• Users can filter news by topic.  For example, you can just view New York crime news if you wish.
• Popular articles, discussions, and active neighbors are now highlighted, allowing users to find the most viewed items on the site.
• Every location now has separate news, discussion, and neighbors tabs at the top of the page to enable users to more easily find out what’s going on around them.
• All content areas fit on one screen.  With the new design there is a minimum of scrolling necessary.  You simply click the next button to view the next screen of information.
• Page loads are minimized.  Extensive ajax has been implemented throughout the site to reduce page loads and significantly speed up the user experience.
• We have introduced map-based advertising via a partnership with Lat49.  As you drag the map, the ad unit below the map changes to reflect the location you are viewing.  This will allow us to serve up more highly geotargeted ads to users.
• We now have local news headline widgets for every town and thousands of neighborhoods in the country.  Users can paste these into a web page or blog to have continuously updated articles displayed for their specific location.

We hope you like the improved speed and ease of use of the new site.  As always, we'd love to hear your comments on the design, so please post them here or use the Feedback form linked to at the bottom of each page on YourStreet.

The YourStreet Team

What a good widget looks like

Thanks to the 10,000 Words blog for including YourStreet's widgets in their article "What a good widget looks like".  We're right up there with folks like NBC and CNN!

Thanks to the handiwork of David Pascual Gil, our widget developer extraordinaire, YourStreet's news widgets have grown exponentially since launching just a few months ago.  Tens of thousands of users have installed our widgets and we now receive over 1.5 million widget views per month.

To get your local news widget, just go to YourStreet, enter the location you want, and click on the "Get a news widget" link at the top of the page.  We have widgets for every location in the country.  Just copy and paste the code into your blog or website and you'll have a constantly updated stream of hyperlocal news headlines appearing on your site.  We also have desktop widgets available which you can add to either Mac or PC.

YourStreet Introduces News Filters

YourStreet now has news filters available.  For any location on the site you will see a drop-down menu allowing you to view Business, Crime, Entertainment, and Sports news.

So if you're in San Francisco and just want to just view entertainment news, select Entertainment from the drop-down menu and - voila! - the page reloads to just display entertainment info.  Select All News from the menu to go back to the unfiltered view.

We're still working on perfecting the filtering, so you may see a few miscategorized articles here and there.  You also will find some areas with no Crime news.  We're continually adding new sources of information and hope to have all categories of news filled in for nearly every location in the near future.

As always, let us know what you think of the filters by leaving a comment here or using the feedback form at the bottom of every page on YourStreet.

Improved Functionality on YourStreet

Over the last month we have been quietly rolling out some improvements to the user experience on YourStreet.  Here's a few of the things that have been introduced recently:

• More informative tooltips.  When you mouse over a map pin you'll now see the headline of the article or discussion, allowing easier and faster exploration of the map.  As before, clicking on a map pin gives you more information and a link to the content.

• Comment previews.  You'll now see a real-time preview when you leave a comment on an article or discussion.

• Subscribe to discussion threads.  When you create a conversation, you now have the option of having new comments emailed to you so you don't have to keep checking back to see if someone responded.

• RSS subscriptions for discussions and articles.  There's now an RSS feed for every article or conversation on the site.  Want to follow an interesting conversation?  Just subscribe to its RSS feeds and follow the comments in your favorite feed reader.

• Flagged content.  If you see an inappropriate comment on YourStreet, there's now a "flag content" link that you can click to report it to us.

• Faster site loading.  You'll notice that the article list now loads before the map so you can see more content quickly.

We're working on a bunch of even bigger improvements which we'll be announcing in the next few weeks.  Is there a specific change or improvement that you'd like to see on YourStreet?  Let us know on the comments, or use the feedback form on YourStreet.  We'd love to hear from you.