Near.ly, a hyperlocal blog aggregation service, launched today to demonstrate Outside.in’s latest API for syndicating geolocated news and blog content. Curious about local news in the San Francisco Bay Area, I signed up and connected the news API to my Twitter account. The process was fairly simple due to Near.ly’s focus on the ultra-minimal design. After finishing, I switched over to Twitter and anxiously awaited news about my neighborhood.
Three hours later the first post was sent to Twitter. It wasn’t local news at all. Instead the message was asking me to digg the service to help spread it to my social network. I think it would be unlikely that would happen if customers have yet to receive any news from the service.
Near.ly’s FAQ says that it only aggregates news within 1000 feet from the location you designate. This is a very narrow area -- my house is probably more than 1000 feet from the downtown location selected. That’s one reason news is lacking. Still, I know of at least two good blogs about my neighborhood that update regularly. There's also a local newspaper.
Disappointed but wondering what went wrong, I decided to check out Outside.in’s API driving the service. I was able to input my zip code there and produce a small number of stories. Still, it was not as many as I’d expect from a Bay Area city.
So I decided to replicate roughly the same service using Yahoo Pipes and Sprout to display the stories. It took a bit longer to use a Pipe and find the right keywords, but once finished, it took just moments to aggregate a large number of local news stories from the newspaper as well as blogs in the area.
Whatever has gone wrong with Near.ly’s service, it doesn’t seem to be either my location or the number of blogs in my area. Share below if you were able to get Near.ly to work and what you think of the service.
Comments
I was not able to get it to work either. (I'm in SF). Everyblock.com has been working surprisingly well for me for street-level news. Only nitpick is that it doesn't cover every city, but otherwise it's really deep and it's not a silly Twitter bot. Topix.com does a decent job of covering the ENTIRE country but it can be hard to navigate. I check that site from time to time.
First off, sorry about the problems.. please get in touch with me directly and maybe we can figure this out. It is a brand new product, the API that is. Thank you for the feedback!
Hi Chris,
The outside.in API (and near.ly, by extension) are only sending you stories located within 1,000 feet of your address. That accounts for the low-ish volume of stories coming in to your Twitter feed. The premise here is that stories within that narrow zoom, while infrequent, are sure to be of interest to you, hence you might want to pay special attention to them. (You might even want them in your Twitter feed...)
If you want more volume, and less granularity, you can always go to our city-wide San Francisco page, http://outside.in/Mission_San_Francisco_CA where you will see more stories from the past 24 hours than I care to count. Or if you want to strike a balance, you can go to a neighborhood page, i.e. The Mission: http://outside.in/Mission_San_Francisco_CA and see fairly granular stories while still getting a pretty good volume.
But the point of this phase of our API is not volume - that's pretty easy to reproduce. This is about stories near you -- stories VERY near you. It's about local signal as opposed to city-wide noise. Once you start experiencing that the results can be pretty interesting.
John Geraci
outside.in
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