outside.in 2.0
outside.in became slightly less beta (or is that slightly less alpha?) today with the release of a bunch of new features and enhancements.
We now have city overview pages for all 62 cities in outside.in. These show at a glance all the high-level information about what’s new and interesting in the city, including the most popular posts and places (more on those later) and the latest posts and places. It’s a way to get a snap overview of what’s interesting in the city.
We also added Places. We’ve always had the ability for Neighbors on the site to add specific locations to new posts, but now they can add actual Places — a Place is some noteworthy location in your neighborhood that people like to talk about. It could be a restaurant, a park, or just an intersection that everyone hangs out at — anything that has a specific location. The really cool thing about this, and the thing that differentiates us from the many Yellow Pages-esque business listings sites, is that we aren’t so conceerned about a Place being an actual business. For instance, there’s a Whole Foods coming to Brooklyn soon, and even though the grocery store doesn’t exist yet, it has a space in outside.in where people can learn about it and add their comments.
Also very much improved are our Neighbor profile pages. All outside.in visitors can now create their own profile pages with information about them on the site. You can add a photo, specify your neighborhood, and so on. We’re going to be building this area out a great deal more in the coming weeks so that it will be easy for our visitors to meet their Neighbors, on- and possibly off-line. When combined with the Places, this will turn into a really cool way for learning about a neighborhood, even the one you already live in. Neighbors can add Places to a list on their own page, so you can go check out someone’s profile and say, “Ah, there’s that person who I always see at the Coop.
Steven has written up a couple of good posts describing neighbors and places and a post introducing the new investors on the site.
Fred Wilson of Union Square Ventures, one of the VC firms involved in this round, has a post on his personal blog about outside.in and the Union Square Ventures blog has a great post describing what they like so much about outside.in.
For good measure, here’s the press release, too.
