With a few friends I've been working on a new site, now called YellowBot. Recently we removed the password protection from our beta, but it's not entirely ready for the world to use yet so we are doing a "quiet launch".
That's one of the reasons for this vox post rather than a post at my more widely read regular weblog.
Another reason, of course, is that we are HUGE Vox (and Flickr) fans. It's funny how a few years ago you'd go to Amazon for design hints - now Cal, Mena and Nate is who we look to!
We love the sensibilities of Flickr and Vox! Our site isn't anything like them - it's a yellow page / local search site for starters, but it's been interesting to observe where we've gone looking for patterns when we've needed them. When we dream we dream of being the FlickrVox of local search (well, we dream a few other things too, but let's not have to mark this post "may be offensive").
Anyway, please try finding your local pizza place, read Vani's review of Sushi Ike (our local sushi joint) or see my profile page over there. Yes, it's embarrassing that we don't even have a place for Vox, Flickr or even a weblog url there! Hey, we had to make the basics like searching work first! :-)
We also have grand plans for making APIs and such to make it easier to integrate our stuff (and more importantly your stuff if you write reviews or tag stuff on the site) elsewhere. Get in touch if this is something you'd like to play with and I'll get you hooked up as soon as possible!
Question: what makes this site different from Google Local? Or is this supposed to be a mashup not a huge startup type deal?
Posted by: omouse | 03/23/2007 at 10:42 AM
Hi omouse,
That's a good question! In some ways our site is more like Google Local than some of the other comparisons (yelp, insiderpages, ...).
Right now the biggest feature differences is that we let you add tags, photos and reviews directly (where Google Local only scrapes those things from other sites).
Also - our local search results are better! Or if it not, let me know what you searched for and we'll get it fixed. ;-)
The only "mashup" quality of our site is that we do crawl other sites for information and use a bunch of APIs for some of the plumbing of the site (Amazon S3, Google Maps, etc etc).
- ask
Posted by: Ask Bjørn Hansen | 03/27/2007 at 04:51 PM
Thanks for the explanation. It looks like a solid site.
Posted by: omouse | 03/27/2007 at 05:53 PM