Location, Location, Location - Facebook Local

I love Kirsty and Phil from Location, Location, Location, I was watching it last night, they have such a great working rapport. Banter but mutual respect..perfect working relationship.

Anyway, seamless and completely tenuous link out of the way. I saw this news article the other day and it reminded of the key topic in the future of the web - the Local Web.

AOL are investing $50 million in 500 new local sites in the USA, with plans to follow suit in the UK.

The importance of locality and geo targeting services was reinforced by Alex's blog post below on Foursquare and the news of Facebook Local and their foray into geo targeting services. Will Facebook becomes Workbook?

Geo location services are about adding value and enriching a users locality experience.

In the UK, the local press really missed a trick, coming too late to the web party to provide any value or build up any user-loyalty to their community sites.

Who is going to fill this void? and there really is a gap in the local market.

Loving Yelp and their local peer recommendation model.

Who will bring locality based insight and services into recruitment?

Comments

[Alex Hens]

Fish4jobs?

;-)

[John]

I am not so sure the local press completely missed the trick - some of the local sites are very good and have a lot of user interaction. Then again it could just be people on the local sites that I use but http://www.getreading.co.uk/ and http://www.thisisstaffordshire.co.uk/
have loads of interactions and strong online communities. People talking about local issues, sport and news. My feeling is that the local press are really starting to get it right and that a lot of media people forget the strength of the brands within the community. The majority of the losses from the local press have been because of poor business decisions and financial management. We will see more cross media brands where they are providing strong content that can be consumed in a format the user wants - this model actually works for the local press and can probably answer a lot of the commercial pressures they have faced because of low advertising rates. And i do not care what anyone says one of those formats could still be paper ... especially to be consumed on the tube, train, toilet and lets not forget the beach.