Citysearch Becomes More Social and Mobile
Citysearch, the popular local restaurant and shopping guide, announced a new beta version of its service tonight. The new version provides a better local search experience, with the ability to search specific neighborhoods instead of just metropolitan areas. Citysearch also announced a retooled mobile site, which lets users read and write reviews on their mobile devices, and gives them access to menus from participating restaurants. Citysearch has also implemented Facebook Connect, which allows users to log in to the site with their Facebook accounts, and the company plans to roll out OpenID support early next year.
You can fine the new beta at beta.citysearch.com.
Obviously, the restaurant review market is quite crowded right now and a lot of the updates to Citysearch were surely prompted by the success of other services like Yelp.
More Local
Besides giving the service a cleaner and more modern look, Citysearch also retooled the back-end to allow users to perform more granular searches. While the old Citysearch was only focused on 140 metropolitan areas, the new version allows you to drill down to the neighborhood level.
Social
The new version of Citysearch puts more emphasis on the social experience by highlighting reviews from your Facebook friends while browsing through reviews. Besides making the sign-in easier for new users, Citysearch now also allows you to publish your updates on the service to your Facebook profile. On the service itself, setting up a profile has now become easier, though you can't really do too much with these profiles besides adding your profile picture.
Users can now also vote reviews up or down, which is a nice feature, given that some reviews can be blatantly biased.
The update also puts more emphasis on professionally produced videos of local establishments. The new player, which is provided by BrightCove, allows for wide-screen HD playback, which is a nice upgrade from the old version.
Mobile
Early next year, Citysearch will start to allow users to upload their own photos and videos to the service. Citysearch also expects to release a native iPhone application around the same time, though for now, the updated mobile site is already quite useful.
Overall, this is a nice update to Citysearch and puts the service back on par with its competitors. In the mobile market, however, review services like Yelp or discovery services like Whrll have a head-start and it will be interesting to see if Citysearch's mobile site can compete with these.
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The UI team of CitySearch rocks !!!!
Citysearch search team rocks!
new search is 100 times better !!!! Faster and more ocurred
Wow, those comments above look...well....like they are from CitySearch staffers.
Anyway, I was going to comment and say thanks for featuring the best Sushi restuarant in Portland in the screen shot. Syun is seriuosly awesome!
"Privacy
Loss of privacy is the primary concern people have with social mapping and other location-based services. While many people try to build a firewall between their real lives and their anonymized on-line personalities, it will be impossible to maintain that separation should they start using location-based services; anonymity becomes thin when your cell phone tells you that you are standing three feet away from "citygirl105". Knowing someone's location is a two-way street, and if users want to reap the benefits of finding out where other people are, they will also be forced to share their own locations. People will know where you are, for better or for worse. Parents may embrace systems that track their teenage driver's location but they should be prepared for the day when that same system, which perhaps their company uses to help coordinate team members that are flying to a convention in another city, can also be used by their boss to follow their movements when they call in sick. (Did you really stay in bed all day...?). "
The world as the interface – location data and the mobile web, Jonathan Follett in receiver magazine, Autumn 2008
http://www.receiver.vodafone.com/the-world-as-the-interface
it will be impossible to maintain that separation should they start using location-based services.