Gaycities, a review website for members of the LGBT community, has revamped its interface and introduced a number of new features that should help make their reviews more relevant.
Founder Scott Gatz says that the LGBT community is very diverse, and that many reviewers have dramatically different tastes. To help deal with the diversity, Gaycities is introducing improved user profiles that will help users identify other users that share similar tastes. When users find a reviewer that they like, they can choose to “Follow” that user, which will display their actions in an activity stream and help them discover new restaurants, hotels, bars, and clubs.
The site is also introducing support for photos in reviews, which allows users to help better depict their favorite locales. Flickr images will be automatically imported as well.
Gaycities launched three years ago as Gatz’s hobby, and has since seen immense growth, especially in the last six months.
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Sweet! We have a site we’re about to launch called “StraightSities” (note the alliteration
It’s for non-GLBT folk. We feel the heterosexual community needs a special place b/c myspace/ facebook/ yelp just won’t do. We don’t want interact with those that are different.
This reminds me of my mother telling me that, “Everyday is Kids Day” in response to my questioning Mother’s day and Father’s Day.
This site gives a whole new meaning to Lower Manhattan.
Frank,
Your argument is a tired one. If you don’t understand why people with a certain commonality group together… I guess you don’t really understand about being social.
Everyone has their own thing. While being gay doesn’t define a person as to who they are, it’s still a part of their life. There are certain places that are very trendy and friendly towards gays and there are places where there are not (in terms of living and vacationing). I know I always wanted to go to Fiji. It’s my dream vacation. Unfortunately, I was not aware that Fiji considers homosexuality a crime punishable by death. How sad.
I’ve got to get back to being super gay and super isolating myself. You know, because every day is gay day. I’m also thinking about joining the army while I’m at it. Maybe I’ll get to travel some.
With very few exceptions, gay people are extremely accommodating of straight people (women and men) who want to step into their world. But if you, as a straight person, don’t care much for that particular world (even if you’re not homophobic), then you’ll understand why there is plenty of room for gay social networks.
If we could offload just 10% of the gay men out there cruising on Craigslist alone onto a social networking site, we’d be larger than Facebook.
i’ll just say this - scott is a brilliant product guy (i know him from yahoo) and he’s got a great sense for consumer products. it’s sad to see this already turn into a debate about homosexuality - that’s not what this is about…scott’s simply providing a valuable recommendation service (and probably more someday) for a group of like-minded individuals. all gay people aren’t the same, but in the same way that there are Women’s travel sites, or Family, or Singles, why can’t there be a gay site without a debate?
Let’s just focus on the merits of the product. It’s a good product from a great, talented individual.
OK, so first of all I am gay, and I have lived in San Francisco for ten years. I’ve seen a dozen or so websites or magazines like this that lived and died.
The sad truth is that most of the gay bars in San Francisco suck. If you want to go to boring, aseptic places with bad music where you can’t even smoke, well great, but it’s kind of pointless to collect scores on the Castro bars where the rating scale varies from “God this sucks” to “if I have to listen to this song again I’ll blow my brains out”. If you’re visiting from Topeka, KS maybe it’s an improvement, but if you’re from Europe, you’ll be astonished at how completely boring it is.
Basically this is a tourist magazine. Locals never use these sites or magazines, never did, and never will. They rely on friends to call them with a tip about a fun band or party, or some reason to go to a particular place. So as a source of local intelligence, sites like this are completely useless. A few bar rags survived, but mainly by cutting advertising deals with one of SF’s porno studios.
As for gay tourists, they primarily want to get laid. If they wanted to sit around paying $8 for Cosmos while watching the latest Beyonce video, they could do that at the lame ass gay bar in their home town. This is where these services fail. They always edit out “seedy” listings, instead focusing on bed and breakfast listings, gay restaurants (is the food gay?), etc.
Blow Buddies, which John Waters famously compared to Starbucks, is conspicuously absent from these sites. Having hosted many many out of town guests, I can say from experience it’s one of the first destinations they ask about.
If you’re visiting San Francisco, the best source of local information, apart from friends, is Betty and Pansy’s Severe Queer Review. It’s very entertaining and brutally honest (and generally accurate). It’s also one of those antiquated technologies otherwise known as a book.
i’d like a little more consistency in linking from pictures/icons to either the actual company being discussed or the crunchbase article. ideally, the opening of the company name/website will go directly to the company/website, and the opening pic/icon/image will also go directly to the company/website.
it’d be cool to have a little (cb) link after each company name.
the popup snap stuff is still a loser. if it was blazing fast, it could work to some degree - in theory, but seeing as how it is slow as sh**, it’s a nonstarter. just annoying.
looks like the gay vertical has caused a mass debate.
@Jose, that’s about as honest and direct as can be. You can’t buy feedback like that.
all the best.
best
-larry MR. Big Parker
James ~ Well said.
I’m not quite as jaded as Jose but, I agree to an extent. Ratings are subjective. I tend to avoid the touristy areas of most cities. I currently live in SF as well. Perusing the general referrals I found places I enjoy and places I avoid w/pretty much equal ratings.
The point of the article was the site owner(s) recognize the problem w/subjectivity and seem to be shifting their approach to helping like-minded individuals connect vs random ratings. This would greatly increase the reliability of referrals.
If the site fostered connections to other social networks they could greatly increase their appeal. My .02
Hey Frank! I can imagine that for some heterosexual men, straight bars are extremely difficult to find. Have fun at TGI Friday’s!
I’m Matt Mansur from Reno and I’m a pro cyclist with the Reno Wheelmen and I think its fine to be a gay cyclist. I have a few girlfriends I sleep around with but I prefer the guys. With Obama, gays will have more rights and child support will be taken from the hands of stupit female judges in reno.
I’m the real Matt Mansur and I did not write the post from Jan 22. Whoever knows about this please contact me. Unfortunately, another gay Matt Mansur is posing as me and I won’t tolerate his agenda. This is a violation of my rights as a gay cyclist.