Portland-based Goboz, which has been available to a closed group of beta testers, has officially gone live, today, as promised.
Goboz features Citysearch-like functionality for reviewing and rating business. And the company has been working to position itself in this light. I mean, it’s Portland. We like to chat about our restaurants and bars. And, continuing down that path will likely be Goboz’ best means of supporting the site with local advertising revenue.
And, it’s true: Citysearch is horrible. It’s an easy target. No argument there.
At first blush, the easy Goboz brush-off could be “Another Digg clone?” or “Is this another Pligg site?” Do we really need another way to rank restaurants and bars in town?
Maybe not. But Goboz has something we do need. I’m thinking there’s some real potential here. That, if Goboz plays their cards right, they could fill a very interesting niche for the Portland Web community.
I think the true utility of Goboz is its ranking engine. Not for businesses, necessarily, but for Portland-based news and blog entries. And currently, that sort of activity is vastly under-served in our beloved Rose City.
I mean, as far as locally focused news-ranking services go, there’s The Oregonian reddit. And then there’s…. Well, that’s about it, actually.
So, while Goboz seems to want to lump themselves in with the Citysearch crowd, I’m going to advise you head over to the Goboz site with “Portland’s Digg” in mind. There could be some real value to the blogging community in that type of service.
In fact, I’ve added this post to Goboz, and we’ll see if you agree.
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[…] by members of the team that launched Goboz in 2007, CitySpeek was designed to fill some gaps in functionality that larger microblogging […]
[…] by members of the team that launched Goboz in 2007, CitySpeek was designed to fill some gaps in functionality that larger microblogging […]
@Jeff That wasn’t directed at you. You’ve played it straight.
Actually, I never though of Jeff the Great as a “fake name.” I thought that’s what I was really supposed to call you.
I’m talking about people who have the same IP address as Jeremiah and yet have “just heard” about Goboz “through the grapevine.” If you catch my drift.
Enough. It’s done. Tied off.
Let’s get back to it.
Hey, I’m not affraid to say who I am! Matter of fact, I think I am your #1 commenter, ya?
Rick,
Thanks for your understanding needless to say I think two individuals wont be helping with Goboz anymore.
@Jeremiah Consider your knuckles rapped and your apology accepted. Let’s get back to playing nice.
Rick,
I personally want to apologize if some of our rather eager beta testers got out of hand on your post.We have been working hard and it appears that some of them drank too much of the Koolaid.
@Steef: I meant that launching a product is the easy part. Fostering the community to make that product successful is “playing your cards right.” That’s where I was going with that.
Okay, kids. Some of these comments are clearly hype-spam comments. You know who you are. I don’t have to name names.
“Let’s show up and post fake names in hopes that the readers of this blog are fooled.”
Sorry, I can say with absolute certainty that the readers here are smarter than that. Much smarter.
So knock it off.
I appreciate that you’re excited about launching your new product. I get that. I know you want people to love it.
But posting spam isn’t the path to success.
If you want to post here about how great you think your product is, how hard you had to work on it, or how cool you think it’s going to be, that would be great. And it would be informative to the community.
But I’m not going to let you destroy this forum with crap posts.
I would strongly suggest you come clean and play it straight. For the benefit of everyone involved.
Just heard through the grapevine about Goboz. I can honestly say its about time someone made a site that works as well as it looks. Now I get to brag to my friends in Florida about Portlands newest website.
“That, if Goboz plays their cards right, they could fill a very interesting niche for the Portland Web community.”
And what are those cards? We want local news (check), local what’s the best restaurant (check), we want local events (gimme), local …
What cards do we want? Now we’ve got local web2.0, what local info do we want web2.0-ified?
Looks like we have finally have a local site that could become popular locally and nationally. Seeing as the founder commented on taking the site to other cities soon I can see now why they talk about Goboz being a hyperlocal site. I could care less about news and businesses that AREN’T in my neighborhood. Looks like I finally have a choice now 🙂 congrats
@Jeremiah Thanks for taking the time to explain. Pity, theportlander.com is a great url.
I can help clear all of ThePortlander questions up. We started that as a test bed for what we wanted to eventually build “Goboz” .We have had decent traffic to the site but we also never did any marketing for it. In the coming weeks we will point the domain for ThePortlander.com to the Portland page for goboz. As we will be launching Goboz in Seattle,San Fran, and L.A by the end of the year.
It looks like my Goboz post has been added to The Portlander as well.
It will be interesting to see how the two sites differ in terms of the traffic and whatnot.
@Ryan Nothing like hedging your bets. 😉
Never mind, the same group/person is behind both sites. So much for a competition ;-).
I re-discovered The Portlander yesterday (thanks to Matt on the pdxwi site), which is aiming to serve the Digg for Portland niche too.
I like the Goboz idea, it should come in handy for my current project under development.
One other thing, Goboz created a Google Gadget for iGoogle pages. I don’t mean to plug my blog or anything, but I have the instructions in a post from last week.
Goboz launches Digg for Portland – Silicon Florist…
Portland-based Goboz, which has been available to a closed group of beta testers, has officially gone live, today, as promised. Goboz features Citysearch-like functionality for reviewing and rating business. And the company has been working to pos…
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