Street Fight Daily: 08.31.11
A roundup of today’s big stories in hyperlocal media, technology, advertising and startups.
“The golden age of daily deals, led by the unprecedented growth of Groupon, seems to be coming to its end,” writes Ben Parr. “That’s not to say daily deals won’t be sticking around for a long time — clearly there is a business in it — but when two major players withdraw from the space and its biggest player experiences a 50% traffic decline, it’s a clear sign that the daily deals market is no longer in its heyday.” (Mashable)
A little over a year after Gannett and Yahoo teamed up on local ads sales primarily for the publisher’s 81 community newspapers, the two are extending their partnership to include all of Gannett’s 19 local TV stations. (PaidContent)
In the Catskills region of upstate New York, where flooding from Hurricane Irene wiped out entire towns, a hyperlocal site called the Watershed Post is helping to coordinate relief efforts and trying to connect people who are stranded. (CJR/News Frontier Database)
Social questions mobile apps are usually advertised as a way to find out, in real time, the status of a location. Normal application tends to be situations like wanting to know “Is that bar crowded?” But users are starting to find even more practical uses for these kinds of apps, with questions along the lines of “Is it safe to go surfing right now?” or “Which stores are open?” as during Hurricane Irene and the London riots. (GigaOm)
Flickr has introduced a new privacy feature called geofences that allows users to create geographic privacy settings for photos’ location data. (Mashable)
Longitude, a new online experiment that went live this week, presents a geographical interface for accessing content from The New York Times. It’s a relatively small project, but this type of functionality may become a part of your future news reading experience. (ReadWriteWeb)
Groupon has identified a huge new business opportunity and grown mind-bogglingly fast. It has fought off hundreds of competitors, including Facebook and Google. At the same time, the company has also benefitted from the novelty factor of its primary product, daily deals, and that novelty may be wearing thin. (Business Insider)
“What conclusions can we draw from these pullbacks by Yelp and Facebook?” asks Peter Krasilovsky. “Some of the press thinks it means that deals are going down, having already peaked. … But here’s another thought: what if the pullback shows that there really are, perhaps, barriers of entry after market leaders have been established.” (Local Onliner)
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