For Brevity's Sake: NextStop, Twitter for Activities Launches

Written by Dana Oshiro / June 1, 2009 6:05 AM / 5 Comments

This post is part of our ReadWriteStart channel, which is a resource and guide for first-time entrepreneurs and startups. The channel is sponsored by Microsoft BizSpark. To sign up for BizSpark, click here.

Created by former Google employees Carl Sjorgreen and Adrian Graham, privately funded San Francisco-based Nextstop launched this morning to help thrill seekers, tourists and foodies find the concise recommendations they need to plan their daily excursions. At first glance, Nextstop may appear like an amalgamation of crowd-sourced review site Yelp, Yahoo's event site Upcoming and travel listing site Dopplr; however, the site has two major differences - recommendations are positive and can only contain a maximum of 160 characters.

Nextstop hopes to remove the presence of rants and emotional weather reports from the discovery process. The company's commitment to brevity and positive discovery ensures that recommendations stay relevant and therefore more conducive to search than some earlier review-space predecessors. In other words, Nextstop is scaling back the capabilities of user-generated content for the sake of utility. You might actually find a good Chinese restaurant on your first try.

In addition to the limitation/feature of the 160 character count, Nextstop's contributors reap the benefits of Google's APIs as each recommendation is met with automatic address and image suggestions. And like any child of the 2.0 era, what would a recommendation site be without Facebook and Twitter and blog integration?

Nextstop also sponsors community Challenges to encourage new recommendations. Challenges generally consist of top 5 lists with recommendations on everything from hot spots in Salt Lake City to vegetarian restaurants in New York. Upon completion of many of these challenges, Nextstop makes a donation to a local charity in the area of the recommendation. To complete a challenge in your city visit nextstop.com/communitychallenges.

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Comments

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signup / facebook login for nextstop didn't work for me. %^(

perhaps there's a load o' folks that's overloading the system?

"More businesses die from indigestion than starvation."

too bad. nextstop looks great.

Posted by: Flash | June 1, 2009 7:48 AM

Sorry about that -- bit of an onslaught at the moment. Think things are back in order now, but please let us know at feedback@nextstop.com if you are still having problems.

Posted by: Carl Sjogreen | June 1, 2009 7:58 AM

Great post! Congrats on the RWW gig. I look forward to reading many, many more from you.

Posted by: Mark Pannell | June 1, 2009 8:54 AM

Thanks Mark. And Carl, I cannot say how impressed I am with your site. I'd already planned a trip to Spain and these Basque Coast recommendations look amazing: http://www.nextstop.com/guide/aVpG-tu5s_I/exploring-the-basque-coast/

I know you're looking at mobile capabilities...if you build the app, I'll be the first one to install it.

Posted by: Dana Oshiro | June 1, 2009 9:03 AM

Thanks for the post and the kind words. We'll definitely let you know when we've got something to share in the mobile department.

Posted by: Carl Sjogreen | June 1, 2009 9:54 AM