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Radar Is Live

I'm really excited to report that we launched Radar today, the most significant addition to outside.in since we first put up our alpha site 20 months ago.

The list of cool things you can do with Radar is long, but I think the basic premise is pretty simple and intuitive. Tell us where you are, and Radar shows you what's happening around you, at increasing levels of zoom: the 1000-foot scale, the neighborhood scale, the city scale, and "Everywhere Else" in the U.S. (Those of you who have been reading this blog for a while will recognize the zooming concept.) Right now, we're tracking blog posts, news stories, outside.in discussions, and Twitter tweets, and organizing them all both around specific places and topics. You'll see more content -- and more kinds of content -- flowing through your Radar in the coming months.

One of the things I love about Radar is that you track can specific places: schools, real estate developments, playgrounds. We'll "star" any item that comes in about that particular place, and if you happen to to be zoomed in on a location far from that place, we'll make sure that the item shows up in the "Everywhere Else" zoom level.

You can see two key ideas at work here, both of which are central to our philosophy about what hyperlocal means. The first is that to date hyperlocal hasn't been local enough. Yes, it's nice to see news filtered by your zip code or your town, but there are more immediate zones that matter even more than that. A deli closing within five hundred feet of my house matters a lot to me; a deli closing ten blocks away is pretty much meaningless. (This is the Pothole Paradox I wrote about last year.) The thousand-foot-view lets you zoom in on precisely that zone of core interest. This is one of the concepts that drove us to create dedicated Place pages for hundreds of thousands of places around the country a year ago; Radar takes all that information and makes it immediately easy to parse.

The other big idea about local is that people care about specific places that are, in some cases, scattered all around the world. I'm fascinated by the Hudson Yards and High Line development projects in Manhattan, and so I've set up my Radar to track those specific places, even though I live in another borough. I don't see all the hyperlocal news from Manhattan's neighborhoods in my Radar, but I do see every mention of Hudson Yards and the High Line.

The underlying principle here is that hyperlocal is all about places that are geographically close to you and emotionally close to you. Radar lets you see it all. So go check it out...

From CNN.com/DowJones: Apple's IPhone Must Avoid The Razr Trap.

The iPhone is, by all accounts, a truly innovative piece of technology. Yet the most innovative parts - its user interface, its touchscreen capabilities and its appearance - remain what Apple brought out with the original device. The iPhone's latest additions, such as the ability to tap faster wireless networks and its location services, have been available in smartphones for years.

  "Where's the innovation?" Global Equities Securities analyst Trip Chowdhry said in describing his initial impression of the new iPhone.

Unbelievable to write a whole piece like this and never once mention the SDK and the App Store. Did any of these people see the keynote? At least a third of it was devoted to all the innovation happening through third-party applications. Yes, technically it's true that those innovations won't be specific to the 3G iPhone, in that first-gen users will benefit from them as well. But that doesn't mean that the iPhone product won't get massively more appealing to consumers starting mid-July thanks to those innovations.

Think of the games alone: the current iPhone is not a game platform at all, in that none of the applications available for it directly are games. But starting in July, the iPhone will be one of the three most innovative handheld gaming platforms in the world, and certainly the one with the most innovative controller interface. (We saw how that worked out for the Wii.) Yes, the hardware for the iPhone 3G is more of an incremental advance. But everything else happening to the platform is as game-changing as it gets.

Turning 40

I turned 40 today, and for the past few weeks, I’ve been thinking a little about what this milestone means to me, trying to figure out exactly how I feel about it all. So I wanted to write down some of the loosely-connected thoughts and memories that have occurred to me over that time.

If you went back twenty years or so, and I asked people who knew me then to name my most distinctive qualities, “fear of strange food” would have ranked very highly. I was notorious for eating only the most whitebread (and mayo-saturated) items in the supermarket: Pringles, Lucky Charms, Coca-Cola. (Somehow despite this intake I was 6 ft. 1 and 130 pounds when I arrived at college.) “Foreign” foods with even the hint of spice were out of the question. In college I did finally get the inevitable taste for Indian and Chinese, though even then the joke was that, no matter what the cuisine, I would inevitably track down the dish that was closest to Steak-Ums and order that forever after. My diet was literally plain vanilla: For my first thirty years, I actually hated chocolate.