SuggestLocal - quick networking around your meeting place

By Vivek | February 6th, 2007 at 03:31 pm ET         

SuggestLocal newly launched platform wants social networking to happen around the places you can meet. You can quickly search for restaurants or bars or coffee shops in your area and send invitation to your friends for a meetup. Your friends receive the suggest link in their email, from where they can respond to your message. As soon as your friends respond, AJAXy refresh displays the updates on your end - in other words you can have web-based chat session. Nice part of the service - On either end, no one needs to signup for the service. I am not sure how this approach will workout if you are sending requests from multiple email addresses, since it might be associating your IP with your email address. Anyway, the option for “Your Previous Suggestions” is broken right now. So only way to know what you have suggested is by looking into your emails.

Like most people, my email box is already clogged with number unread and to-respond emails. More emails coming in just add to the mess. I think it would be great if the meeting/event information and SuggestLocal URL is added to the emails and that information conforms to microformats used by Gmail and YahooMail. This will make it easier for everyone to add the meeting information to their calendar, instead of bringing up the link+copy+paste option. More calendar formats they can support, the better.

As for sourcing the local search data, SuggestLocal didn’t go in web scraping way. Instead it gets all the local business listings from Yahoo Locals. I presume there should be a limit on the number of hits you can have for free against the Yahoo API. Personally I don’t prefer building entire business model on top of Google and Yahoo APIs ‘cause you can find yourself attending to their whims when your site starts getting real traffic.

Links:
SuggestLocal