Toronto based Ourfaves.com seeks to combine city search, social networking, and user-generated content in a one stop destination for a particular city.
City search and profile sites aren’t new. Where OurFaves differs is a focus on user-generated content. OurFaves enables local aficionados to share and discover favorites on a city-wide scale, connecting people with one another and their community in a Web 2.0 environment.
Tagging of entries by contributors sees related information captured and shared across the site that is not simply limited to tourist and mainstream attractions. Samples given are “a perfect patio for summer drinks, an unbelievable mushroom and arugula salad, or a great place to buy vintage rock t-shirts”. Creativity is the only limit on what can be included.
Toronto is the first city to be covered by the company with plans in the works to expand OurFaves into other North American cities in the months to come.
Umm, isn’t this Yelp in a slightly different format? Hasn’t Yelp already wrapped up this space?
Cmon, TJ. Yelp has not already wrapped up this space. Believe it or not, most people haven’t heard of Yelp yet. And even though I have and I think it’s pretty good, I think there’s room for improvement over Yelp. While it definitely has a lot of benefits, Yelp is a closed system that hasn’t embraced the open Web. Many of their users are self-indulgent writers, churning out empty review after empty review, trying to be cool and social. Their community in the Bay Area is much more active than those in the other cities.
Before Yelp, hadn’t Citysearch wrapped up this space? Before Excel, hadn’t Lotus 1-2-3 wrapped up the spreadsheet space?
There’s always room for innovation and competition.
go T.O.
Its kinda like Israeli based ILCU, isn’t it?
The leader in this space is prolly going.com. They got 200k users in only three cities. Peep them here:
http://mashable...07/04/25/going/
This is a Torstar Digital initiative. For those who don’t know, Torstar is one of the largest media companies in Canada and publisher of the Toronto Star. They’re trying to keep this fact somewhat quiet for obvious reasons.
Local search with user content? iBegin.com was doing that in Toronto over a year ago now.
Torstar is also behind Toronto.com
they have to niche this. yelp and going aren’t doing a good job. their userbase isn’t nearly as active as the college students on collegetonight.com. that’s all i hear about now… these event sites are stupid anyways.
ChickAdvisor.com is another site doing this in Toronto. I believe they plan to expand to other cities in the near future.
Ourfaves isn’t trying to hide the fact that its associated with Toronto.com…on almost every page for locations it has a link to toronto.com. The challenge with Yelp is that they do a few cities very well and others not so well. In the end its all about dedicated and passionate users if a site doesn’t have that then they dont have anything…ahmedf should know his site has dedicated users and thats why its useful.
I love Toronto and the GTA. There is so much to offer every age group and interest. Our Faves looks like an attractive site. It will be interesting to see whether it produces ‘reliable faves’.