YourStreet “Relaunches”- what a joke
YourStreet initially launched as a real estate community for buyers and “real estate enthusiasts.” In an oversaturated sea of real estate “communities,” YourStreet is the first domino to fall in a line of “real estate community” sites built by techies aiming to cash out on Realtors, home buyers and home sellers.
In the world of public relations, words like “failure” or “closure” are replaced with epithets like “retool” or “relaunch.” The fluffy term “relaunch” is used to pad the site slipping into Plan B- make the website an info aggregator. Mashable noted that YourStreet has the potential to be a cool tool, but after visiting the site I learned the following:
1. In Austin (not a small town), there is only one user that has registered. The “news” events are all submitted via the Houston Chronicle (huh?) and the third function of YourStreet is chatting which totals zero conversations so far in Austin.
2. The site offers embeddable widgets for your blog so you can show off your neighborhood, but in the crowded world of “communities,” YourStreet will find difficulty in gaining users (especially since it doesn’t offer anything new and lacks topical focus making it difficult to reach new users). I find it hard to believe that a map with no users shown will impress anyone reading your blog.
3. The WORST PART of this relaunchedpointless site is that Google ads litter the entire page. Instead of allocating a strip of valuable Internet real estate, YourStreet has dedicated what feels like more than 50% of their page to Google ads. Yuck!
Do I need more reasons that YourStreet is just a sign of things to come? I wonder how they’ll spin it when the site is shut down… “YourStreet Retires?”
October 31st, 2007 at 12:31 am
I cruised “YourStreet” for my location, sunny Gilbert, Arizona.
For some reason a damn map of San Francisco kept popping up.
There is some activity at the site for my area, but I swear it is mostly “seeded” questions. Why would anyone log in to this site, create a profile, and sit back and hope someone answers them as to where a local pizza place is? It would be far more efficient to spend 5 seconds on Google, or even get in your car, point it in some random compass direction and drive for 5 minutes….
November 1st, 2007 at 6:25 am
Do the geniuses over at YourStreet also subscribe to the notion of spamming their audience and prospective customers like these boneheads Zadzoo?
January 18th, 2008 at 2:02 pm
[...] S&L crisis- what happens when times are back to being good? What does recovery look like? I wrote last fall about a “relaunch”of the website YourStreet.com. I laughed that a website that was failing retooled and made some [...]