YourStreet.com is today's "Cool Site of the Day" for the Kim Komando radio show.
Kim Komando's radio program is syndicated nationwide on over 450 stations and attracts more than 2 million listeners.
Anyone who tried to access YourStreet early this morning ran into the torrent of traffic that Kim sent over. Sorry for any delays you may have experienced, but we have everything running fast and smooth now.
Thanks choosing YourStreet Kim!
If you've ever publicly launched a website, you'll know the mix of exhaustion, nervousness and anticipation our team went through over the last few days. We're thrilled that the YourStreet website withstood the traffic onslaught without breaking a sweat (thank you engineers!).
We're also very excited about the great response YourStreet has been getting from both press and users. The site has been called "elegant", "one of the best mash-ups ever", and "a great achievement." Thank you one and all for your kind comments.
We got lots of press about the launch. Here a few of the highlights:
TechCrunch: http://www.techcrunch.com/2007
Read/WriteWeb: http://www.readwriteweb.com
AppScout: http://www.appscout.com/2007
Mashable: http://mashable.com/2007/10/29/yourstreets-relaunches/
KillerStartUps: http://www.killerstartups.com/Search/yourstreet—Everything-on-your-Neighborhood/
Download Squad: http://www.downloadsquad.com/2007/10/29/yourstreet-find-news-and-conversations-in-your-backyard/
Screenwerk: http://gesterling.wordpress.com/2007/10/30/yourstreet-now-topix-meets-outsidein/
Sellsius Real Estate Blog: http://blog.sellsiusrealestate.com/cool-websites/local-news-mapped-and-yapped-on-yourstreet/2007/10/30/
And thanks to DemoGirl for her screencast of YourStreet: http://flash.screeniac.com/yourstreet-dg/yourstreet-dg.html?TB_iframe=true&height=590&width=1050
Thanks again to everyone who took the time to write about YourStreet or come by the site. Even though we've launched, any and all feedback and suggestions are always welcome.
See you on YourStreet!
James Nicholson
Founder
After much behind the scenes tinkering, we are very pleased to announce that YourStreet will launch next Tuesday, Oct. 30th. You can check out a preview of the site at www.yourstreet.com. A press release, fact sheet, screen shot, and logo are all available in the Press Room area to the right.
YourStreet is the first website to index and map thousands of local articles, blogs, and conversations down to the street level. YourStreet fundamentally changes how you discover and connect with the information that impacts you most – what’s going on in your town, your neighborhood and even your block.
Newspapers and blogs publish a huge amount of local news every day, but until now finding relevant local information about your immediate environment has been extremely difficult. YourStreet’s unique map-based interface brings “hyperlocal” content to the next level, allowing users to explore their community in an entirely new way.
YourStreet uses a highly sophisticated algorithm that leverages natural language processing to scan and interpret news articles, extracting highly specific location information. Unlike other news aggregation sites, YourStreet goes far beyond keyword matching – the algorithm can identify references to local entities like schools, sports stadiums, airports, bridges, and determine their exact latitude and longitude, giving users unparalleled access to local information. For the first time you can visually experience the news by not only seeing what’s happening but also where it’s happening.
YourStreet also provides users with the ability to start local conversations, add articles to the site, and post user profiles, creating a layer of unique user generated content on top of the aggregated news articles.
The YourStreet.com website launches with coverage of more than 35,000 locations across the United States, mapping over 10,000 articles per day from more than 5,000 news sources.
The entire YourStreet team is very excited to finally unveil what we've been working on for the better part of a year. We hope you'll find the site fun and informative. We welcome any feedback you may have about the site, so please leave comments here or use the Feedback form linked to at the bottom of each page on the site.
Big thanks to everyone who helped test the YourStreet beta site. Your suggestions and feedback are much appreciated. We got to many of your suggestions and hopefully all of the bugs you ran into.
We're now putting the finishing touches on the site prior to launch. We'll be announcing the launch date in the next few days, so stay tuned!
We're very pleased to announce that YourStreet has started private beta testing. While not everything is finished, you can get a pretty good idea of what we've been up to for the last six months.
If you'd like to access the private beta site, just go to www.yourstreet.com and enter your email address.
As a beta tester you'll be able to help shape YourStreet and tell us what you want in a local service. So send along your email and we'll set you up!
It was a long, crazy, busy day at the TchCrunch40 DemoPit on Tuesday the 18th. Thank you to everyone who stopped by and provided feedback on the site. The response was terrific - it was great to see people get what we're doing almost immediately.
We're also very pleased that PC World magazine named YourStreet one of the highlights of the DemoPit. According to Mark Sullivan, YourStreet was one of "five or six [companies] that I thought were filling a real need with a good solution."
You can read the full post here:
http://blogs.pcworld.com/staffblog/archives/005462.html
Thanks Mark and PC World for the kind words!
We will be previewing YourStreet in the DemoPit area of the TechCrunch40 conference all day on Tuesday, Sept. 18. The conference is being held at the Palace Hotel in San Francisco and looks to be great!
So if you're curious what we've been working on for the last six months, drop by the DemoPit this Tuesday.
If you want to get even more involved, we'll be starting private beta testing of the site next week. If you want to be a beta tester go to YourStreet, enter your email address, and we'll contact you.
I'm pleased to announce that YourStreet has been selected as one of the 100 finalists for the TechCrunch20 conference. There were over 700 applications to TechCrunch20, so making it to the final 100 is a great accomplishment. The 20 presenting companies will be selected from this pool of 100.
We have secured a slot in the TechCrunch20 demo pit, so regardless of whether we make the final cut, we'll be showing off the new version of YourStreet at the conference. TechCrunch20 looks to be a fantastic gathering of venture capitalists, journalists, and start-ups. See you there!
James Nicholson
Listening to the market and quickly changing directions when necessary is critical for any start-up. That's what we've been doing at YourStreet.
While we were happy with the initial version of the site, we thought we could do better - a lot better. Over the last few months we've learned that our users want to talk about all things local - not just real estate. We've also learned that keeping up with news about your neighborhood is really important.
So I'm excited to announce that we are overhauling YourStreet to focus on transforming the way you experience local news and information. While I can't get into too many details yet, I can say that the new YourStreet will bring you closer to the news that really matters to you. YourStreet will be an entirely new way of exploring and learning about your street, your neighborhood and the world around you.
While we re-tool YourStreet over the next couple of months, we decided to take down the current site. I look forward to sharing the new YourStreet in the near future. If you have any questions or comments about the change, I'd love to hear from you.
James Nicholson
founder
Now that the YourStreet website has been successfully launched into the world we have had a chance to take a step back and see what we've created. When you're in the midst of developing a brand new website it's hard to get any perspective on it - it's just to-do lists and grinding it out until launch day.
In the post-launch analysis it struck me that there are three key questions that any new website has to ask itself:
How are users going to find you? For some lucky sites like Facebook, growth occurs virally and unbelievably rapidly. However, viral growth can rarely if ever be planned for or predicted. For others word of mouth works, but ends up taking a long time to build critical mass (Craigslist). And for yet other sites, great content leads to high ranking on Google and users find you through search. The latter is probably the most common way that new sites build traffic, but to grow quickly this way you need to have a lot of relevant content generated every day.
What will make users interact with your site? Once users find your site, what's going to make them interact with it? Some sites like CNET have great content. Other sites like MySpace have lots of users that you can connect with, creating a community. Some sites like Yelp or Digg - so-called social media sites - combine content and community. For this to happen, though, you need to have at least some content or community in place already. This is the downfall of so many new social networks - there's nothing in place for users to interact with, so they go elsewhere.
What will make users come back to your site on a regular basis? To grow a lasting website, you must have repeat users. Having a unique community that a user feels connected to definitely helps. Users will come back to see what folks in that community are up to. The average Facebook user returns to the site many times a week, often more than once a day, because they want to keep track of what their friends are doing.
Providing a useful service also gets repeat users, though perhaps not as frequently as a successful social network. If I'm looking to rent an apartment I go to Craigslist first. If I want to buy a book, I go to Amazon. These companies have built a brand around providing a useful service.
Another strategy is to have continuously updated, relevant content for your users. I go to Yahoo Finance almost daily because I know they will have the latest information on the companies I follow. Similarly, blogs that update at least once per day have a much, much bigger audience than blogs that update once a week. It's as much perception on the part of users as anything else - users know when content is fresh and they seek it out.
These are basic questions, but it's amazing how many new sites launch without having at least some answers. The thinking that "if I build it they will come" turns out to be true for a tiny, tiny number of sites. For everyone else - and I definitely include YourStreet in this group - we have to come up with good answers to tough questions.
