The fact there was this “top-down-command-and-control” mentality to me spelled its demise. Why was it only within their purview to add new locations? Why was the user allowed to add his own, similar to the way NeighborhoodCrossing.com does it? In this era of UGC, sites like BackFence were a step back to the past, and no one I know looks forward to the past.

I also agree with the conjecture that their choice of cities were not the most advantageous either. Add to that the snail’s pace at which they added new ones…it was bound to end in disaster.

what are these ‘other sites’ that already do this ‘interest aggregation’? do any of them work?

as for all the ‘not choosing the right towns’ comments – bizarre. and that’s all i have to say about that.

i agree on Backfence’s implementation – not good. i remember hearing that it was some guy’s customization of something or other. brilliant.

and the ‘heavy hitter’ management – they had pedigrees in absolutely nothing, yet were hailed as saviours for hyperlocal. nothing against them – i just remember thinking how absurd all the ‘management’ hype was.

as for ‘the formula’ that sites should use to provide local news, learn from the people who are doing it right – google, topix, craigslist, and indymedia.org. this doesn’t have to be rocket science.

oh, and don’t choose a horrible name for your website. chance of failure for any local news venture is directly related to the corniness and predictability of the URL for said venture – as demonstrated.

– paid for by PayPerComment

These people are smart… one loss isn’t the end of the world. When you are bankrupt you still have many opportunities. Many billionaires go bankrupt one or more times in their lives.

cheers.

yep, want to hear about all of them, not just the winners… keeps it real

PS: wonder if you are a TC employee, maybe in marketing division, haha
This is a great way to get feed back for article content

Smalltown is doing very well. Our informal blog documents our progress ( http://blog.smalltown.com ). In the area we serve, we get tens of thousands of monthly visitors, almost 3 percent of the population are registered users, and our sales numbers are accelerating.

It’s certainly too early to say Smalltown has “cracked the code” on local advertising, but here is one way to judge our progress:

1. Go to http://www.smal...wn.com/sanmateo and do a search for “hot dogs”. You get lots of great results that include a local pizza place that has hot dogs on its menu. There are videos, coupons and reviews. This is deep local content and we launched less than a year ago.

2. Now go to http://www.yellowpages.com and do a search for “hot dogs” in San Mateo, CA. After navigating to the category “hamburgers and hot dogs” you get 3 results. Two of them are sandwich shops outside San Mateo. One of them is a hamburger diner with one badly written review. This is an example of broad but shallow content.

3. Now go to http://www.citysearch.com and do the same search. Under the sponsored link for Pizza Hut, the top result is for a bakery outside of San Mateo. Under that is a listing for a golf course outside San Mateo. The third result is for a sushi restaurant, but at least it is in San Mateo. This is another example of broad but shallow.

4. Finally, go to http://www.yelp.com. I think Yelp is great and I don’t really consider them a Smalltown competitor, but I was surprised by the results. Their search results for “hot dogs” in San Mateo are: (1) a sponsored link for dog daycare (2) a link to a dog park (3) a link to an event called the Maker Faire that I assume had hot dogs and (4) a listing for Ben Franks, which is a hot dog restaurant, but it’s not in San Mateo.

IMHO: The best place for hot dogs in San Mateo is Jack’s Grill next to the movie theater across the street from the Smalltown office. Try the apple chicken sausage. But you wouldn’t know that from any of the “broad and shallow” sites.

In theory. To some extent, you have to wonder just how interested people are in reading about the town’s little league championship, what happened at the church BBQ on Saturday went and what was decided at the last City Hall meeting. I would argue that the future of news and information distribution is more likely to be hyper-targeted than hyper-local. That is, most people, faced with increasingly little free time, have very specific interests and would probably be most receptive to services that enable them to efficiently and accurately aggregate news and information about those interests. Obviously, there are services like this out there and I think they’re more likely to have long-term success than services which are focused on very narrow local topics.

Perhaps Backfence executed poorly or was ahead of its time, but one thing is clear: it’s going to be a lot more difficult for user-generated content and citizen media efforts to become a real force. Even if you believe that the mainstream media isn’t serving consumer needs well, Backfence shows that simply being non-mainstream won’t guarantee success either.

Hyper-local is the future/present of news and information distribution. If we’ve learned anything from Web 1.0 and 2.0, it’s that a great idea doesn’t always equal a profitable business – especially when you are one of the first guys in the game.

Savvy news managers will integrate Backfence’s best ideas into their evolving news content delivery models.

Best of luck to visionaries like Susan – and her believers – that get “IT.”

@TJ – You’re totally right. The sight was really hard on the eyes and confusing to understand. If you’re playing to smaller cities, the best advice is always easiest: (KISS) Keep it Simple Stupid.

We’ve made a lot of mistakes in our efforts, but our initial plan has gotten us to where we are today. We’ve scaled by listing every business in the U.S. and making them searchable within all the major search engines. A business can easily ‘claim’ their listing and customize it. 150K signed-on in cities big and small with NO SALESFORCE. We hope it’ll be enough.

As for Backfence employees, I think they’ll be okay finding a job. Just like many of us who learn from our mistakes, they saw what worked and what didn’t – first hand.

Sincerely,
Kevin Leu
http://www.merchantcircle.com

For example, founders or executives can’t no longer get second chance or ask for VC money. Banks, government, and IRS have their records.

Best way to sell their million dollar homes and start living apartment.

Any plan is just a words on paper and there is no any guarantee of success.

There are a number of sites who are looking to target this space. It will be interesting to see which ones get to scale first.

Businesses always have Mr. Long versus Mr. Short as financing options – Mr. Long looks for bootstrapping and other creative financing in contrast to Mr. Short’s venture capital and other short term investors.

Backfence needed financing that makes Mr. Long happy. Too bad, interesting idea, poor financing decisions.

BackFence’s demise and the lack of traction for similar sites like Smalltown.com spells an end to hyper-local sites that try to do one town at a time. That’s just not sustainable or cost-effective. Sites like Topix and a few others that apply their technology on a nationwide basis seem to be doing much better.