Almost a year after taking $3 million in funding from Menlo Park’s Formative Ventures, SmallTown.com is launching its Flash site for small town local reviews tonight. I personally find this much Flash annoying but the site might catch on with users who like the look and feel.
The San Mateo company wants to provide a visually rich site for reviews and listings of businesses that don’t get indexed by larger sites, like dog walkers and babysitters. The display is built out of expanding and contracting modules they call “web cards.”
Web cards come in two flavors, free and enhanced. Free cards allow you to post a picture and a short narrative about whatever you want. They are also used for comment threads. Enhanced cards cost $40 a month and allow you to add 4 more tabs of information that include galleries and printable coupons. Cards can be organized into personal lists by drag and drop and can be easily cross linked.
By default any businesses SmallTown can find in a listed city are included and can upgrade their card to enhanced by claiming it with the site. Only two cities are included at launch but the site will be expanding with time.
I like the multitab option for enhanced listings and the site has some potential to be visually appealing. As it stands though I found the navigation counter intuitive. SmallTown skips the social networking angle that Yelp takes and for listings in small towns outside of hip metropolitan areas that makes sense.
I think the success of this company will come down to the response on the part of its target audience to the Flash UI. I find scrolling more difficult and the illusion of smooth flexibility disconcerting. It reminds me of Famster, the family oriented social networking site that combines heavy doses of Flash and paternalism. I think Flash has its place (I think $1.6 billion proves that) but building an entire site out of it feels awkward to me.
Flash interfaces seem very out dated these days… I couldnt stand the interface personally.
That aside, a web site of a similar vein is NowTowns – http://nowtowns.com
It too is currently limited to two cities – Corvallis and Albany, Oregon. You want to see amazing detail of businesses (full menus with pictures, atmosphere shots, event calendars, etc), go to the business section there and poke around. Lots more non-business oriented content as well.
The interface is a bit clunky and uses too many scroll bars. Still, I like the concept and would use something like this a lot to find bed & breakfasts, small cafes, and spas.
Somehow I just get a much better connection with a place when I can see its picture, and I often rely heavily on reviews when making decisions.
Now if only someone would expand this to locations in Asia!
The flash seems fine to me, but the interface does seem clunky – perhaps it’s too blocky? I had trouble understanding what the site did immediately, the interface didn’t seem to convey any purpose. They should also brigten up the colors a bit, I felt like I was browsing real estate listings or something.
The site is great and all, but that chick in the San Mateo video is hot!!!
3 million funding?tell me how?
I agree with Marshall on this. I find that any site that is too flash based is usually not easy on the brain. Whenever I see a site intro page with “View site in Flash” vs “View site in HTML”, I click HTML.
HTML came much before Flash, and maybe this is the reason why it is more intuitive and acceptable for us. Use Flash where necessary (i.e YouTube, as Marshall pointed out), but when it isn’t, go for XHTML/CSS.
Dumb Design, My mom would never understand the terminology “listings” and things like that. Someone needs to design a REAL USER INTERFACE, with the understandings of applications into mobile.
Bad, bad interface.
“Too Flash-based?!” You can make any type of UI, preloader/no preloader, entry options, etc. in Flash. Aside from running in the Flash player, a site can mimic a standard “HTML” site easily. And it can make use of CSS.
It’s sad so many have a bias against a fantastic tool like Flash (animation, dynamic content, audio, video, it’s got it all) because most of their experiences involve banner advertising.
This, simply, is a bad interface – regardless of how it might be displayed. Blame the designer, not the medium.
I see a trend of local services on the web. http://www.smalltown.com/ reminds me the recently launched http://www.citizenbay.com/ .
i use this flash cityguide. this site displays all the entries on a map.
–> http://www.cityhunter.ch
The best feature on Flash is “Skip Animation”…
The UI components on site make it look like it uses Laszlo from http://www.laszlosystems.com/. Laszlo was reworking their product so you could ouput in either DHTML, Flash, and someone (a third party) had added SVG. Never actually actually seen anyone use it outside of a intranet. But this is interesting none the less.
The site looks nice and all but I think it’s liking the community interaction that would make it popular. No real features for the businesses to interact either.
I hardly see San Mateo as a “small town.” I grew up in a small town. We had 3 traffic lights. A small town doesn’t even need a website because everyone knows where the best burgers in town are. Heck, you basically have 3 choices, McDonalds, and two local joints.
Your site is very good. In Brazillina that is a top of the tops.
Thanx
I’m a bit curious how they plan to gain “traction.” Said differently, it seems that SmallTown has a “Chicken / Egg” problem.
SmallTown is only useful to local residents if it has something appealing to offer – a lot of useful information (as in comprehesive) about local businesses / services – and it is only useful to businesses if local residents are actually perusing the site – especially if they have to shell out $40 a month / ~ $500 a year for their listing. (Besides the obvious question as to whether their will be return on that investment, how many “dog walkers” or “baby sitters” are willing / capable of paying such a high fee … just wondering as “unindexed businesses / services” seems to be SmallTown’s core “reason for being?”)
Overall, I think SmallTown is a great idea. However, I think this service would only generate sufficient “Traction / Velcro” if it were bundled with another site / offering. (Think of a mall, there are 3 to 5 “Anchor Stores” and then 20 to 50 “Peripheral Stores.” The “Peripheral Stores” need the “Anchor Stores” to attract customers / survival. SmallTown is a “Periferal Store.)
If someone from SmallTown could please help me see why this is not the case, I’d be very appreciative.
wow – bad idea. the flash is quite slow, and totally useless on older browsers and mobile phones. also there is no search engine benefit to having a listing on this site. all the gray colors really make the design uninteresting. The worst of all: NO BACK BUTTON
flash (in firefox) alerted me that the site was trying to retrieve personal information from me – always a big turnoff.
unfortunately i really don’t see where this company is going.
Small towns? as someone mentioned San Mateo is hardly small. In the case of such “towns” I wonder if they want to be considered such. If they are trying to get traffic from truly small towns, such as those I grew up in in Colorado and Iowa they are missing the mark. There are a lot of folk who still have crappy bandwidth…that’s the number one argument against flash imo. Although dependency on any plugin / activex control is a bad idea for “small town users” as you can’t rely on them to be up to date.
$40/month for a small town business is too much. Again, I guess it depends on your idea of a small town.
The ever-loving Flash debate…I’m one to skip it all together, and my experience is not based on banner ads but obnoxious designer sites that think their fancy display is worth my waiting. For this site in particular, if they’re attempting to help small town businesses with visibility, WTF are they using Flash for?
3million for this?….. I’ll pass
I think most of you are taking the name SmallTown too literally. New York can be a small town if you focus on your neighborhood. I hope they will not limit themselves to cities with a population of less than xx.
Yellowpages.com is a disaster. Citysearch is barely ok. I’m glad to see smart people with resources working on local search.
DavidEzra is right. You need some existing community to make this work. If Smalltown is the egg, something like http://www.brooklynrecord.com is the chicken.
As I am sure most here do, when you use Firefox with a mouse gestures extension for navigation, and you get to a flash site – you right click and instead of moving back and forth through the site, you get that flash settings menu.
I immediately unbookmark and move on. Flash has its place, but IMHO it is not for an entire site.
I find the site design and layout unattractive. Nice soft colors but there are way too much color contrast and tones.
too clunky for me, too hard to use. i hope they read these comments and make some adjustments.
I like the blog post smalltown blog post… http://hrucker....biquitous_.html
“Do gas stations really think I can’t figure out that $2.49 per gallon is only a penny less than $2.50? Yet this pricing method is so prevalent it would actually look strange to see a station selling gas at a price rounded up to the nearest whole digit.”
Um… yes they do and you just proved it… You’re paying $2.499 per gallon, 1/10 of a cent less. That means they round up until you pump that 10th gallon.
At $3,000,000 for three cities, it’ll only take a few billion to add all of the small towns.
I think they’ll fail because of the lack of towns, almost all users will pass on this site because their town is not included. You’ve got to grab as many potential users right away, I sure don’t go back to a site that has nothing to offer me.
Being from a small town I think the concept is great. Just one problem….PEOPLE IN SMALL TOWNS OFTEN USE DIAL-UP. Believe it or not many small towns still do not have access to high speed. If you have ever tried to use a flash site with dial-up you know that it is just not happening, therefore illiminating a portion of the already segmented market they are targeting.
Not only is the flash annoying, it’s slow, slow, slow! I’m on a fiber connection…not worth even checking out.
I am not a designer nor a programmer but in my opinion, Smalltown, is an elegant, informative, fun site. After viewing the “how to” video I was able to create my own webcard. And even my 80 year-old mother was able to navigate the “listings” section to find some local fabric stores. This is welcome addition to the local community sites. In fact, I think it sets a new bar in regard to authentic, helpful content and beautiful design.
for a snapshot of your home town,,,,just type your zip and click all interest
on the new social networking site http://www.iPoste.org:
INTERNET NEWS & NOTES
——————————————————————————–
Web Site Created To Connect Communities
(NAPSI)-There’s good news for Internet users who find searching for information about their interests can be time consuming and frustrating.
A free search engine and interactive Web site has been created. Its purpose is to connect people with their local and interest-based communities and provide only the most relevant search results based on a user’s search parameters.
Called iPoste.org, the site collects timely news feeds and provides a forum for posting classified ads, jobs, calendars, real estate listings and user comments about specific areas of interest-at no charge and on a single Web page. The site is said to organize and display timely information by city or zip code, free of pop-ups and other commercial distractions.
According to the site’s manager, Dave Collins, it’s a place where people can easily and efficiently find and post all sorts of useful information about a specific topic, either locally or nationally.
To learn more, visit the Web site at http://www.iPoste.org.
A new Web site is said to offer a snapshot of timely information about your community-with the click of a mouse.
It’s interesting how local news ebbs and flows in popularity. I’ve just been part of a small team that launched ecolocal, a local news site for green and eco-friendly news:
http://www.ecolocal.com
Been there, done this. The problem is that small local businesses don’t belive in web advertising. Good salesmen can sell them door-to-door, but not remotely. I tried this for a few years, went nationwide but inevitably gave up because I couldnt find a way to monetise. Wish you luck!
P.S. Google will penalize you in many subtle ways as you grow..they have Google Local, you know
Don’t count on search engine traffic
I think “flash headers” are OK but not a full page of flash. I came across a forum web site, that seems to be devoted to low gas prices in small towns and big towns for that matter. It is at: http://www.gassos.com
The whole site seems to be about saving fuel using electric cars and discussions about fuel savings. They having nothing to sell but encourage people to participate in the conversations.
I liked your blog. Just be in this way!