The Social Wave Blog by Sheldon Chang

In the month of March, it appears that two giants of finding stuff on the big global Internet has decided to shrink down and put a lot more emphasis on finding stuff at the local level. Is this a sign that we're starting to see the Internet as just another channel for communication rather than as the big global medium that we've been touting it as? According to one of the two referenced articles, it says that "A lot of times when people are looking for something, they want to do it on a local level...This is a core search promise."

Yahoo puts local content on the map | CNET News.com

Google goes local | CNET News.com

I gave both of these localized search interfaces a spin. Their addresses are http://local.yahoo.com and http://local.google.com. The advantage goes to Google at this early stage even though Yahoo's interface is considerably more developed. That's exactly the problem though. Yahoo's localized search interface is closely tied to CitySearch which I find to be somewhat useful, but it's always been a relevancy challenged tool for me.

I tried looking for coffeeshops in both of the interfaces and got different results in both. The Yahoo/CitySearch results were particularly bizarre. Do a search for Coffee in the town of Campbell, CA and in the top five you get Motel 6 as a coffee spot. Mmmmm, there's nothing that perks you up like really bad tasting burned Motel coffee made with rusty water. A lot of the Yahoo results were irrelevant and looked like there had been some unusual manual categorization work to influenced the results. I did find the two most important results coming up on the first page though.

The Google results were far more interesting. They not only pulled up the two big local coffeehouses that any respectable cafe directory must be able to show, but it also found one not as well known coffeeshop in my town. What was particularly exciting about the Google results was that it also included "related search items" for the business that was found. For the most part, there's not a whole lot of good related content to business listings unless that business has its own website, but in some instances it matched the name of the busines to someone's blog entry or to what would otherwise be a long buried review of the coffeehouse from a small local paper.

Google appears to be on the smarter track. By matching up content to mere business listings, they make the Web work better for people interested in using it for local purposes. As a Web designer, I hope this signals a boom for Web designers working for small local business owners. The way I see this, it could either be a great enabler or a killer for a project that I'm launching called Hometown Merchant Network, which is kinda like online dating for businesses. Loosely put, it's an online mall of local merchants with the purpose to introducing local merchants to their most likely source of sustenance, the local residents.

My problem with CitySearch is that I rarely find enough content that I want about a place even after I find the place that I'm looking for (which is more than a challenge than I want it to be). CitySearch has a built in ratings and reviews module which in theory should provide it with a killer edge against a technology like Google's that merely matches a name with random hit or miss content, but anyone who's tried to make use of the CitySearch reviews has had the experience of being frustrated by the feeling that you just can't count on the reviews. You don't know who the people are and all too often you can smell a vindicative ex-customer or some other bias in the opinions. An unmoderated reviews system in which people are mostly anonymous is trouble.

When Google Base was announced, everyone immediately speculated about the future of eBay and Craigslist. The emergence of a noteworthy challenger to eBay or Craiglist was inevitable and I think the more meaningful question is what a jolt to the security of eBay and Craigslist is going to produce for the online world. We could be seeing the start of the post-bubble era's equivalent of the browser wars between Netscape and Microsoft. There's more to an ad than just the ability to have an ad and lots of ads, though admittedly critical mass is key. We may see accelerated innovation from eBay or Craiglist to keep their core value propositions from becoming commodotized.

If Google Base is what it appears to be from our limited knowledge of it, it stands to be potential paradigm shift in the viability of regionally based online communities because it could allow small marketplaces to become viable. I'm saying this under the assumption that they would eventually publish an API that would allow third-parties to leverage their classifieds service to produce value added services like a regionally based online classifieds service that's designed to serve a region, a city or even a neighborhood. Another possibility is that someone else will be the first to tap into a third-party network to widen their classifieds distribution channels.

Commerce is an integral part of any community online or off and the growth of a community is often planned side by side with the growth of its economy. In online communities, classified ads have long been suggested as a way of driving up the user base, but there are a couple of problems with this assumption. The first is that few organizations have the resources to sustain a viable online marketplace in the presence of long established heavyweights like eBay or Craigslist. The second is that using commerce to drive an online community often comes at the cost of having a real community. It tends to be an all or nothing affair. There aren't many online equivalents of real life small downtowns where a cozy blend of commerce and people create a core to develop a community around.

As the developer of Social Wave, I've received many requests and a lot of advice to put more attention into developing online ads, but with the limited resources and time that I have, there's just no way Social Wave would be able to sustain an online marketplace unless I made the marketplace the defining element of the way the site and its user interface was designed. Improved classifieds ads is one of our most common requests and to address this demand, I've been looking for a reliable classifieds brokerage service that would allow Social Wave to both publish and receive regionally based classifieds content without having to become a classifieds site itself. So far anything that resembles such a service has so far left me unimpressed.

Could Google Base or an innovation from eBay or Craigslist be the classifieds information backbone that a community focused site like Social Wave needs to produce the online equivalent of the small business downtown strip that helps make real communities possible?

For screenshots and more Speculation on Googlebase, check out the following blogs:
Google Blogoscope and New Google Blog.