Greg Sterling previewed our new 3-week old beta of GuideSpot.com in his blog yesterday, with an appreciated nod “Over time the site could evolve into something very interesting and valuable.” At Local Matters, we certainly would agree. Here’s a little more on the site, and how we see it positioned in the social-vertical-search triangle of local.
Clearly, the growth momentum is there for social participation - consumers are more comfortable with self-expression and interaction every day. Sites that align with this trend generally outperform those that center on search, and create more fundamental pull and engagement. When we looked at this space, we centered our energy on the concept of a consumer’s list at the core of a social engine.
In one dimension a list and a search result page are pretty similar. For example, Mahalo, the human powered search engine, is directly aiming at editorialized search results, a explicit hybrid of search and human generated lists.
GuideSpot aims to that space, but in a different manner. We focus on user generated local lists, a more humble and focused agenda. We do this by wrapping this concept with a rich multi-media self-publishing application, and with a site environment that promotes discovery and interaction. We get local by giving the user direct access to a ton of local content which can be searched and added into a guide. This content comes from our experience and infrastructure for local content aggregation with AreaGuides. We then give a powerful set of mash-up utilities for generating maps, adding images, videos, links, etc.
Take a look at a couple of examples:
LODO Restaurants: A True Local Guide: a detailed personal view of where to eat, with multiple tagged map views
Buying Books for Elementary School Aged Children: “expert amateur” editorial mashed up with local resources
Local Matter’s Visitor Guide: answering all the questions people visiting our office commonly ask
Shmoozer: A Guide to Denver Networking Circles: a guide to a range of choices for business and un-business networking
It’s fascinating how much the ability to annotate, mash-up and share turns a simple list into a rich engaging experience. So, our thinking was to really center on the simple principle of making the tool easy, fun and engaging. The work we’re doing also happens to be at the core of how we see the self-serve advertising products evolving, and it connects nicely into the “list-oriented” nature of how we’ve built our local search engine platform - search, create a comparison view, save, edit and share your list.
Greg commented in his preview that “This combination of lists and location is really only otherwise found on Google Maps’ My Maps”, which I appreciate. This is a great observation to comment on. I have enormous respect for Google Maps, but I think maps are best positioned in a “supporting cast” role, not THE metaphor for local lists. We do generate KML and geotag every guide so they can be published and discovered into map engines (for future product use). But, I think the Google vanilla wrapper interface and map-centric metaphor is just holding back the social energy and creative expression of online consumers.
All of these concepts converge on a vision of rich sharing of interactivity for local consumers - as searchers, as explorers and as authors. GuideSpot cranks it up a notch and gives the consumer the tools and the community wrapper to get engaged as authors and explorers.
Ultimately, we’ll connect this with search but it’s a bit early for revealing that dimension. There are other hooks in the “bigger picture of search and social” which simply aren’t ready for prime time. In the meantime, GuideSpot is - we hope - the spot where a lot of guides get created and spotted! Set up your RSS Reader for Fresh Guides, and have some fun exploring what consumers come up with and push out into the community. Because, the lists can range from practical to offbeat, to downright absurd.
