YourStreet Blog

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.

Google Gadgets vs. Facebook Apps

Before YourStreet released its recent news headline widgets, we did a little research comparing the various widget platforms with Facebook applications.  After all, as a start-up YourStreet has limited limited time and had to decide which avenue to pursue first.  We chose to develop on the Google Gadgets platform and here's why:

• Google gadgets get more users.  While the Facebook applications platform has been getting tons of press, Google gadgets have been quietly building up a huge user base.  There are 10 Facebook applications that have more than 500,000 active daily users.  In contrast, there are 16 Google gadgets that have more then 500,000 users (Google doesn't specify the number of daily users, so it's impossible to exactly compare gadgets to Facebook apps, but it's pretty close).
• Google gadgets can be found in lots of different ways.  The Google Gadget directory gets tons of traffic and seems to be easier to navigate than the unwieldy Facebook application directory.  Google is actively promoting its iGoogle homepage on which gadgets can be placed.  Also, Google gadgets can easily be turned into widgets that are compatible with sites like Netvibes so they can get even more exposure.
• There's a wider variety of popular applications on Google gadgets.  The most popular Facebook apps seem, shall we say, rather trivial.  If you want to find the cutest, sexiest, smartest friends you have, then there are dozens of Facebook apps to help.  As a local news aggregator however, we're looking for a platform where serious content is popular.  Google News, The New York Times, and the BBC are among the top 10 most popular Google gadgets.  The NY Times Google gadget has over 1 million users.  On Facebook, the NY Times app gets a whopping 1,757 users.  Quite the difference.

The Facebook application platform is undeniably active and viral for the right type of app and YourStreet does plan on developing a Facebook app in the future.  But if you're a start-up that's thinking about syndicating more serious content, you should definitely consider Google gadgets.

Get your news widgets!

YourStreet now has nifty news headline widgets available for every location and zip code in the country. 

To get your widget, just go to YourStreet.com and enter a city & state, neighborhood, or zip code.  When you're at the location you want, you'll see a "Get a news widget" link above the map.  Just click this and you'll be taken to a page to get code that can be pasted into any web page or blog.

News headlines on the widget are constantly updated as we find articles for that location, so you'll always stay up to date on what's happening.

Let us know what you think of the widgets by commenting here or using the feedback form on YourStreet.

Welcome to the neighborhood Google

A small start-up named Google announced yesterday that they are now presenting local news.  You might not have heard of this company yet, but I've been told they have a pretty good search engine.

In all seriousness, Google getting into local news is certainly a wake up call (as if we needed one) for local news aggregators like YourStreet.  Is it time to panic?  Not quite, and here's why:

• News is big - really big.  According to Nielsen Online, there's an audience of about 100 million people for news.  Google News currently gets around 10 million users a month, so they have about 10% of the news market - quite different from the 65%+ share Google owns of the search market.  Also according to Nielsen, there are 20 news websites with 5 million or more visitors per month - that's a lot!  Clearly, there's room in the market for many companies to do well, each with a different focus or way of presenting the news.  Unlike search, it's much more difficult to have a one-size-fits all solution when it comes to news.  Some folks are going to want a broad focus on national or international news, others will want a hyper local news experience.

• No one has nailed local news.  Many commentators have remarked that there are problems with all aggregators of local news, including Google.  Creating an engaging, compelling user experience and a reason to return to the site on a regular basis are the keys for any local news aggregator (and for that matter any website in general).  At YourStreet, this is something we're really focused on and I'll freely admit we're not all the way there yet, and neither is anyone else.  YourStreet, Google, Topix, Outside.in, and EveryBlock are all taking different directions on how to present local news and it's far from clear which way is the best, or even if there is one best way of doing it.

• If you're going to go local, get really local.  Google now gives you news at the city and zip code levels (although as far as I can see, news for zip codes is associated with the nearest city, not the actual area of the zip code).  From the start, YourStreet has believed strongly that to truly fulfill the promise of "hyperlocal", you have to bring information right down to the street level.  One of the most powerful features of YourStreet is being able to zoom the map all the way down to your block to see exactly what's going on in your immediate environment.  Associating news with a city or even a zip code is helpful, but to really harness the power of presenting news online, you have to get down to the neighborhood and even street level.

Google's move into local news certainly validates this space.  But it's much too early to declare a winner (or more likely, winners) - in fact, we're all just getting started.  So welcome to the neighborhood Google!

James Nicholson
Founder/CEO

YourStreet Google gadgets now available

If you use iGoogle as your homepage, you can now add a YourStreet local news gadget to keep you up to date.  We have created Google gadgets for many of the largest cities in the U.S.  Here's an example of one for San Francisco:

News articles are updated throughout the day so you'll always know what's going on around you.  To see the complete list of YourStreet's Google gadgets, click here:

http://www.google.com/ig/directory?synd=open&q=yourstreet&btnG=Search+Google+Gadgets

While we've focused on just the largest cities for now, in the next few weeks we'll have news widgets available for every city, town, neighborhood and zip code in the country.  More info on that will be coming soon.

Bird's Eye View of the Iowa Presidential Campaign

Now that the Iowa caucuses are right around the corner, the entire media seems to have turned its attention to the state. You can get a unique, birds-eye view of where the candidates are holding last-minute events in Iowa by checking out YourStreet's Iowa News page.

YourStreet's news maps are updated every hour, so new pins will appear over the next 24 hours showing where events in Iowa are taking place, right up through when the caucuses start.

Want to get a head-start on the next battleground state? Check out YourStreet's New Hampshire News page.

New Design for the New Year

Just in time for 2008, we are launching a redesign of YourStreet's main map page.

Check out the site and you'll see that the shape of the map has been changed from long and skinny to square. We received a lot of comments that the previous skinny map was not intuitive. We think you'll find the square map easier to navigate. With the new design we're also able to surface more articles higher on the page.

You'll also see that mousing over an article pin on the map highlights that pin's article on the left side. We wanted to emphasize that the content displayed next to the map reflects the pins that are on the map, and we think this highlighting helps tie it together.

Finally, you'll also start to see photo thumbnails appearing next to articles. We get content from over 10,000 sources every day. Whenever one of those sources publishes a photo, a small version of that photo will also show up on YourStreet.

We're continuing to refine and improve the design and functionality of YourStreet. If you have any comments or ideas, please let us know in the comments, or by using the Feedback form on the YourStreet site.

Happy New Year from the YourStreet team!

New YourStreet media coverage

We're very pleased to have been featured recently in several prominent publications:

• Wall Street Journal: Online Sleuthing for Home Buyers
• Editor & Publisher: An Important Lesson About Grassroots Media
• MIT Technology Review: Mapping News - YourStreet connects news stories to places, creating a different kind of social network
• PBS Media Shift: Your Guide to Hyper-Local News

Quantifying the "TechCrunch Effect"

Last week we were very pleased to have YourStreet written up in TechCrunch, widely considered the most influential technology blog out there.  Prior to being featured in TechCrunch, we did some research into the "TechCrunch effect" whereby some websites come crashing down due to the huge spike in visitors referred from the article.

Despite a lot of sites talking generally about their experience getting TechCrunched, we couldn't find much actual data on how many users came to the site, over what period of time, etc.  This didn't give us much to go on, so we made some very conservative assumptions and plowed ahead.

Now that we've gone through this process, I wanted to share our actual data to help other start-ups and entrepreneurs plan for being TechCrunched.  Here's a graph of traffic from TechCrunch last week:

Go got a total of 2,914 visitors from TechCrunch last week, primarily on Monday and Tuesday.  We're still getting about 30 referrers a day from TechCrunch, more than a week after the story was published.

The story was posted to TechCrunch around 4 pm on Monday, Oct. 29th.  The biggest spike came in the first hour after the story was published, when we had about 500 visitors from TechCrunch hit the site.  Another surge of traffic came the next morning from 9am-10am east coast time.  This makes sense since the east coasters had probably left work on Monday before the story had been published, and then read it when they got into work the next day.

Overall we found the TechCrunching didn't place too large a load on our fledgling servers.  It probably helped that we were covered late in the day.  I would assume if we had been covered in the morning west coast time that the traffic surge would have been more concentrated because it would have included more east coast readers.

Thanks again to TechCrunch for the coverage.  I hope this data helps other folks to prepare for being Crunched.