Yello.pk – Local news and business listings meets maps and social interactions
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We’ve been seeing a number of attempts at local city-wide listings recently, but Yello.pk adds a couple of new twists to the idea, although I’m not convinced its entirely useful just yet.
Yello provides a Google Map mashup with local news and business listings from the area – it will show a satellite map of your city, and if you search for something (e.g. "pizza") the service will show you map locations for all nearby pizza parlors, including details on demand. Think of it as what you would used Google Local Search for, but with more details.
In addition to that, they provide local geo-coded news reports, very similar to the old AllVoices.com interface (before they took out the map) – basically you get a map at the top, and news reports from that visible region below. Unfortunately currently the news on there too broad to have local relevance.
However, some of its features have great potential, particularly its social elements. Zoom into the map and going to the "neighborhood" section will have Yello find all other yello members who live closeby to you – and this I think is an awesome way of discovering new friends nearby. You can also browser their profiles and see their chosen restaurants, shared news items or businesses or classified listings, which would be an interesting vector to see if you would get along with someone.
Their classifieds section (also again with map-based locations across the city) also has potential, especially for real-estate, where it would be atleast possible to research the area (including nearby people / potential friends / businesses / restaurants all through yello) before making contact.
But the trouble is that all of this would become incredibly useful only if a detailed street-map was available / enabled rather than having all of this happen through a satellite view. Ultimately, having dots on a satellite view doesn’t help me at all to understand where a certain restaurant is.
This comes back to the fundamental challenge of location-based services – the maps just dont exist on google or elsewhere in any open format to let services reach their true potential.
11:21 am
Salaam Osama,
We have enabled full street map information on the map. Hopefully you’ll have no trouble locating the best lassi wala in town on a hot day ever again in Pakistan.
We’re still in private beta, but as we send out more invites to let in the Yellers, the content on the site will inshaAllah become more relevant and localised.
11:24 am
I think the ‘neighbourhood’ idea is really nice. I am not sure if its implemented by any site in USA, because if is, I am sure it will attract a lot of users. Reason being: much detailed maps, and extremely dense internet usage.
Anyways, (Y) for yello
6:25 pm
Hey Osama! You were right-on about the lack of a detailed map … but as Samir said above, we have now enabled it on yellO. So go ahead and explore the possibilities with yellO.
Also, yellO is invite-only for now, since we would like to crease out any wrinkles that we may have overlooked while building it, before making it fully public.
You will witness many things happening at yellO in the coming weeks. There’s a lot more in store!
Oh, let me share our promo/concept video (all shot and edited in-house) with you and G&W’s readers: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fo10if-FbMY
It was fun making that too!
6:44 pm
This site is good, covering everything local, we don’t have any web like this, great efforts done. once it will have information it will be very helpful.
12:23 am
Yello.pk’s potential seems amazing. There can’t be a better description than a “local social portal”. Much needed to let us Pakistani’s truly be able to use the net for everyday life.
Kudos!! Here’s to hoping a fast build-up of the yeller community and a good information database!
12:37 pm
the map details are fabulous.. this can be an amazing tool.