We are delighted to announce the Public Beta release of 5 Blocks Out! This officially wraps up our “limited preview” phase during which hundreds of friends and family members helped us test and improve the site. 5 Blocks Out is now open for everyone to use. Hooray!

For those of you who are new, 5 Blocks Out makes it fun and easy for friends, neighbours, and parents to share helpful tips on local living. If you spend time in Toronto and love neighbourhoods, enjoy walking and biking to local stuff, have kids, or like supporting green and locally owned businesses, then 5 Blocks Out has something for you. Check it out here and see the tour to learn more.

For those of you who are not new, you can now do things you couldn’t do before. You can use the site without signing in, though of course it’s much more fun and helpful if you’re logged in. Over the last few months we’ve also added the Explore page, which shows an overview of what’s going on site-wide, the Bird Nest, which offers community-authored tips for parents with young kids, and hundreds of other improvements to the neighbourhood pages, destination pages, missions, and member profiles. We’ve been busy.

We currently support core metro area neighbourhoods in Toronto (see map). We live here, we love this city, and we think it’s a great place to start. We’ll expand to new geographies over time, based on feedback.

There’s more to come, of course. “Beta” means “work in progress”, and we have a long list of things to improve. Your feedback will help us prioritize what to do next.

A huge thank you to all of the 5 Blocks Out Insiders who’ve helped us learn and grow. Your feedback, encouragement, and inspiration has been vital, and we very much appreciate your help.

Game on!

Katrin and Osh