Digital Trends

StreetAdvisor

October 7th, 2007 | by Ryan Williams

Get to Know Your Neighbors with StreetAdvisor

Traditionally on the web, news and reviews and other general online information, has been available on the larger scale of big cities at the national and international levels. If you live in a smaller city or town, the best you could hope for is a site that the city webmaster built with Netscape Navigator back circa 1997, with glorious animated graphics, an ugly background, and a few tidbits about story time at the library. But with the influx of new technology and communities on the web like StreetAdvisor, Outside.in, Yelp, and NowPublic, local news and information is beginning to emerge at a finer level.

Think about StreetAdvisor for a moment. What could be better than getting socially networked into your own neighborhood? No more neighborhood parties — just hop online to connect with your neighbors. I'm kidding about that, but still, we believe the idea behind StreetAdvisor is sound. Street and neighborhood information is extremely valuable for people looking to visit or move to an area or simply want to know more of what's going on. You could probably apply every single one of those buzzwords above to StreetAdvisor, which speaks to its potential. But it also has a serious chicken-and-egg problem in needing a massive base of users to use the service in order for it to reach its potential. Furthermore, even two write-ups in the vaunted TechCrunch blog have failed to give StreetAdvisor a big enough kick so far, and that worries us. If you go to Portland (Oregon) or Seattle, two fairly large cities, only a handful of users and reviews are there. The problem worsens in smaller communities. We are the only one signed up our test town, and guess what? We are the number one city expert! That’s sad.

Using the Site

StreetAdvisor recently released some new features to help address this problem, which has given us a chance to take a second look at it. Let's take a quick tour through the site.

StreetAdvisor Front Page

There are a few core content types for each street and city: reviews, guides, boards, and media such as photos and videos. For the most part, this is easy to follow, with the reviews and guides being where users share their thoughts and the boards being where the interaction among neighbors takes place. The recent feature update expands these sections into the city level. Before, the city pages were just a collection of the streets; now, users can post directly about the city. There is also a nice mapping feature that allows you to easily spot other streets that have been reviewed.

StreetAdvisor Map View

Finally, let's talk about the users of the site, because though they may be hard to find, there are some out there. By contributing to the site, users accumulate points and then are ranked to find the top local experts. StreetAdvisor provides profile pages for users, but they are fairly limited in what is displayed. I would expect this to grow to include more of the standard social networking profile page features. There isn't a really good way to leave a note for another user, should you want to.

Conclusion

While focusing on the street is a unique angle to providing local content, we think it swings too broad. There simply are not enough people to effectively contribute at the street level for the large majority of locations. For cities like New York, L.A., and San Francisco it may make a lot of sense; but then, why not just focus on those cities initially, and then roll out to others when the site is further along. By shifting the focus to large neighborhood areas or the city level, it would become much easier for users to provide ratings, content, and discussions. We really enjoyed using the site, but until there is more information there, it's not going to become a very frequently visited place.



Pros:

• Nice design
• Well-built site
• Good use of technology and AJAX features
• Fast and accurate search engine
• Great integration with Google Maps
• Easy to understand ranking factors



Cons:

• Most mid-size and small cities are ghost towns, and even some bigger ones are
• Can't do ratings at the city level
• Can't delete street reviews that you enter
• StreetScore metric is of questionable use when all cities seem to be in the 60s range. Can't connect with or contact other users very easily
• Star ratings for city are confusing