I have been tipped off about the launch of mashup sites by Yahoo India for Delhi & Bangalore. Titled ‘Our City’, these two sites have just gone live and while their current state is not hugely exciting, their future potential certainly is. The sites aggregate city specific content from other online services from Yahoo. Given the wide array of popular Yahoo services like flickr, delicious, upcoming, yahooanswers and less popular ones like yahoopodcasts, yahoovideos, yahoo360 etc, suddenly, you are presented with the prospect that if things go right, this site could evolve into the default destination for city portals in India.
I find it very surprising that inspite of having 3-4 major national level players (Rediff, Indiatimes, Sify) and at least half a dozen smaller ones, the Indian internet space is still bereft of popular city portals. True, each of the above mentioned portals have city specific pages, but they are far from impressive. I see this as a huge need gap, that should have been exploited long ago. In fact, if I had to setup a web based business in India for myself (and assuming for a moment that resources were not a constraint), city portals would be amongst my top three choices. Yahoo has correctly identified this as a gaping void, that is just too inviting to be ignored. In fact, Yahoo, with its strong media lineage and having ownership of hugely popular user generated content sites like flickr, delicious etc, is very well positioned to fill this gap. One might argue that many of these popular services are not necessarily India centric, but the fact is that they do have a lot of Indian content, which can be surfaced easily using tags.
The mashup site is essentially an aggregation of content from these disparate yahoo services; there are separate sections for city related photos (from flickr), videos (from yahoovideos), events (from upcoming), bookmarks (from delicious) news, weather, blogs (from livejournal & technorati), podcasts, basic city information (from wikipedia) et al. The current design & layout is a distant cry from the slickness one would expect from Yahoo, but I would expect them to tighten up soon.
One fundamental question arises here– is it possible to create a live, throbbing city portal by using just user generated content? I would think not. But using a judicious mix of user generated content and traditional reporting oriented media, it is possible to create an online repository or destination, that captures the ethos of a city quite effectively. Think of a website which has different types of city related content i.e. audio, video, images, blogs, events, tags, news etc, all converging together. I think that’s what ‘Our City’ is trying to achieve.
I have been following this website from few weeks now, basically use it to get gyan of things happening around Bangalore. And I must say, its upto date and is pretty relevent in few sections. the del.icio.us feature really rocks. Its pretty easy to go through the del.icio.us bookmarks which is hovering around Bangalore. Earlier I used to go del.icio.us and check for bangalore news. Now this website really solves my need for city centric news.
Also did you notice the header image about Bangalore changing its shade at different times of the day. During the day its light blue, in the evening it turns orange and in the night time its, dark blue. Very cool feature. Gives me the right punch.
Dev
Dev,
Thanks for pointing out the header changing colour thing. I wasn’t aware of this. It sure sounds very cool.
amit
Hi Amit,
I am from the Our City team and i am eager to know more about your comment “The current design & layout is a distant cry from the slickness one would expect from Yahoo…”
Can you reply to this email id with specific points on design and layout that you did not like. That would be very helpful. Appreciate your comments and your very thoughtful post.
Thanks,
Sai Sreekanth
I don’t like this ourcity.
It doesn;t give anything meaningful by itself.
I would prefer a city portal that gave city info rather than one that picked up RSS’s and donated info :).
Cheers
Tejinder
Hi Guys,
My 2 cents….
I think the UI looks pretty good & professional and is not too cluttered like a lot of sites these days. Also i did not get those annoying pop up ads.
The mash up of user generated content is good although i feel that they can add a pint of city info like maps, yellow pages etc …but i guess that will come
Cheers
Nice review Amit. Kudos to Yahoo team, Sai you have been very receptive and thanks for including the Hindi blog feed aggregator, it’s good that you people recognized the rise of Indian languages on the net.
It\’s a great and valuable site!d
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