Outside.in

I was reading (yes, I read old fashioned newsprint) The New York Times yesterday, and it seemed like every damned story was about crowdsourcing!

A longish piece about Steven Johnson, author of Emergence: The Connected Lives of Ants, Brains, Cities, and Software, Everything Bad Is Good For You, Interface Culture, and several others has just released a new book called Ghost Map that deals with location and its centrality in people's lives:

[from In a Multimedia Realm Where Book Meets Blog by Robin Pogrebin]

Outside.in — which Mr. Johnson started with John Geraci and his founding partners Andrew Karsch, Mark Bailey and John Seely Brown — was largely inspired by Mr. Johnson’s move from Greenwich Village to Park Slope, where he lives with his wife, Alexa Robinson, and their three boys, ages 5 and under.

“Being here in Brooklyn, I’ve been watching, enjoying and reading all these great neighborhood blogs like Brownstoner, Curbed and Gowanus Lounge,” he said. “You could just see there was this wonderful zone where people were actually the true experts. When it comes to the question of what’s going on in the community, the folks who really know the most are the folks who live in the community.”

On a recent trip to Denver, for example, Mr. Johnson wanted to find out what was going on near his hotel, so he plugged its ZIP code into his Web site. One of the top terms that came up was the architect Daniel Libeskind, who designed an addition to the recently reopened Denver Art Museum.

Johnson is a brilliant writer, and the principles motivating the creation of Outside.in are laudable, but the site really blows.

Location -- especially at the neighborhood level -- should be about people: who are the actual people that actually live in my nieghborhood? What are they up to? Where do they hang out? What do they think about local affairs, like street construction, or new buildings going up, or the new bistro on the corner?

But Outside.in lacks people: it's about zipcodes and feeds.

Yes, the heavy lifting of Outside.in is done by the edglings (the people formerly known as the audience, the users), but the people who associate themselves with a neighborhood or a zipcode never show up directly, all we see are news tidbits and blog posts.

Note that this news traffic is manually associated, too. Should the site be scanning through subscribed feeds for news items tagged in some obvious way, like "zipcode:94107"? Note also that the map matchup with zipcodes seems not to work well: neither of my zipcodes -- 94107 and 20194 -- actually included my locations in the map. And when I shifted the map to the actual locations I care about -- my office in San Francisco on 2nd and my house in Reston VA -- the zipcodes changed to something erroneous.

For the promise of Outside.in to be realized, it would have to be reconceptualized using a better social architecture:

1. Put people front and center in the app -- allow people to affiliate with neighborhoods and zipcodes. I want to be able to discover new people, not just read about things and events. Create profiles for people, where they can affiliate with an infinite number of locales.
2. Move to a social media model -- I would willingly tag my location-oriented posts with some beacon defined by Outside.in ("locale:soma/sf/ca" or "zipcode:94107"), which the tool could use to pull stories. Allow people to comment on the stories within Outside.in.
3. Allow people to define locales by tagging -- I should be able to state that I call my neighborhood "North Hills", and draw it on the map. It doesn't have to be decided by the management of Outside.in. This is perhaps the biggest challenge for a location-oriented service like Outside.in, and the one that is so important to get right.

Until changes like these are made, Outside.in won't really do much of anything, and fails the social litmus test: people will not take up a tool that doesn't take them into its foreground.

tags: outside.in, location, geoloco, steven+johnson, social+networking, crowdsourcing

Comments

[Steven Johnson]

Hey Stowe, great comments (well, except for the part where you said the site "blows" :)) and in one way or another, we're working on all the things you describe. The architecture you see now is designed explicitly to get around the chronic first-user problem. By populating it with geo-tagged posts that WE cultivated, the site is -- at least in the top 50 cities -- filled with information from day one, and is automatically pulling down more information every day. As you know, a site that revolves primarily around users is useless until the users show up. So our strategy was to attract users by giving them a new way of browsing and searching the existing conversations happening around their neighborhood, and THEN give them tools to announce themselves and really take over the site.

Two caveats:

1. There are things we could do better in terms of pointing people to the information right now, and of course, we'd love to have launched with even more information. But that's why it's an alpha launch.

2. Arguably, we could have waited and launched with the social features fully developed so that people would have a better sense of where it was all headed. But release early/release often, right? And particularly release early when one of the founders has a book publication date that you can launch in sync with...

Anyhow, keep the suggestions coming. Oh, and thanks so much for your comments about my writing!
sbj