Category: A little better all the time

2011: Shifting into 2nd Gear

Posted by oshoma – December 31, 2010

2010: Wow, what a year. 2011: We’re looking forward to meeting you!

Today is the last day of a fun, chaotic, and whirlwind year on 5 Blocks Out. We launched our beta release this year. We made many new friends, and leaned hard on our old ones. We learned a great deal. We consumed a lot of delicious coffee. And we worked hard almost every single day on improving and growing the service.

Throughout the year we received a ton of support from our member community, family, and friends. Thank you, everyone, for that. Starting something new is not easy, and it’s often lonely. We value every bit of encouragement, advice, and support.

5 Blocks Out is up and running, new members are joining steadily, and people are adding helpful tips. That said, we’ve really only just gotten started. When people ask us how it’s going we explain, “We’re shifting from 1st gear to 2nd gear”. It’s a good analogy: we know we have the horsepower to reach 2nd gear, but we aren’t quite there yet in terms of momentum. We need to grow the user community further so that people feel there’s a critical mass of friends and neighbours on board. We also need to make the service more valuable for people who already know their neighbourhoods well, e.g. by adding more info on what’s going on nearby. We’re working on both of these initiatives right now, and they’ll be our main focus for the next several months.

If you’d like to help us reach that second gear, here are some concrete things we’d love you to do:

And as always, we welcome your thoughts and proposals. Please send us feedback.

We’re looking forward to 2011. Onwards!

Katrin and Osh

Just Opened

Posted by katrin – September 15, 2010

Did you ever wonder if there was an easy way to find out when new places open up in your ‘hood? Wonder no more, for 5 Blocks Out can tell you about it with the “Just Opened” feature.

Here you can see an excerpt from my latest email newsletter, showing places that recently opened in some of the neighbourhoods I’m following:

And below is a partial view of the 5 Blocks Out web page for the West Queen West neighbourhood, showing places that recently opened nearby. Every neighbourhood displays a list like this, provided there’s something new to show.

So how does this work? It’s community-powered (read: we need your help to make this work well). When adding a new place to the site you simply select “recently opened” to let people know it’s a brand new destination that just opened. In the example below, I’m adding a shop called “Knife“:

I click “yes” to indicate the place recently opened, and then “Save Changes”. Done. Now 5 Blocks Out can start telling people about it.

You can also select “recently opened” for places that other people have added to the site, provided it hasn’t been too long since they did so. Do this by clicking the edit button next to the place address.

We’ve currently set this up to show “just opened” places for about 90 days. Sound about right? Let us know what you think.

You can now “follow” missions

Posted by oshoma – August 19, 2010

If you haven’t seen missions on 5 Blocks Out yet then you should check them out. Missions help you build a list of places and tips with help from other people, and then vote on the results. In the “Queen of Poutine” example below Pam is looking for advice on great places to get poutine in Toronto. Anyone can add suggestions to her mission, write brief tips, and vote places up and down.

Until now the onus has been on mission contributors to check back on the site once in a while to see what’s changed. Remembering to do this is kind of a pain, so we’ve made it a little easier: you can now “follow” a mission, just as you can follow what other community members on 5 Blocks Out are up to.

Here’s how it works: First, find the mission you’re interested in, and open it up. Second, click the “Follow” button to start following. From then onwards, updates on things happening within the mission will show up on your My Stuff page and in your email newsletter.

Mission with follow button

Click the "Follow" button to start following activity in a mission

As the owner of a mission you’re already signed up to follow its activity stream. We also turn on following automatically for anyone who contributes to a mission by adding a tip, adding a place, or voting a place up or down. Lastly, whenever somebody new follows a mission we send a quick email notification to the mission’s owner. (You can control follower notifications via My Stuff > Preferences > Notifications.)

What do you think? Useful? What can we do better? Let us know.