…staring at my iPhone, the city right outside the window suddenly had voice, personality, opinion. Notes started pouring in, bite-size songs of praise about people and places…”

Minh Uong/The New York Times

I love it! What a perfect description of that magical moment many of us have experienced — when you suddenly ‘get’ hyperlocal and realize that these nerdy webpages and mobile apps can literally change the way you interact with your own neighborhood, transforming the cement jungle into a friendly playground ripe for exploration.  The author elaborates on the feeling:

“…crack doors open that might otherwise be passed by, giving personality and accessibility to the surrounding blocks. To walk through the city eyeing your Foursquare tips is to realize just how little of it you ordinarily see.”

My moment of awe came during a visit to San Francisco in 2007. With my WAP enabled phone in hand, I walked down the street googling the names of every restaurant I passed — my obsessive-compulsive way of picking a good one.  A website called Yelp.com consistently popped up at the top of the google searches, and although I had never heard of it, I found their information and reviews extremely valuable.  I suddenly realized the power of this technology: I could get more insight about a restaurant by Googling it than stepping foot inside.

Back in New York, I graduated college and waved goodbye to Morningside Heights and moved into to a completely new neighborhood:  Hells Kitchen.  Again, I suddenly I found myself overwhelmed with choice!  I distinctly remember running cost-calculations in my head: “How much it would cost to try out every single restaurant on 9th Avenue?”  The answer?  Too much.

And here’s where Yelp really shined.  Yelp was my insider guide for my new neighborhood.   I could literally zoom into a city-block and see every single business on the block listed — alongside details, reviews, and tips.  Suddenly I had a way to learn about those ‘off the beaten track’ spots. Empire Tea and Coffee?  If it weren’t for Yelp, I’d have overlooked one of the best coffee places in the city.

Why are hyperlocal services so powerful?  Because there’s a high personal relevancy to the information they offer.   Steven Berlin Johnson (author and co-founder of outside.in) sums it up well:

Say you’ve got a particularly nasty pothole on your street that you’ve been scraping the undercarriage of your car against for a year. When the town or city finally decides to fix the pothole, that event is genuinely news in your world.

It’s news in your world and only your world!  By the way, If you’re not already getting a daily everyblock.com newsletter, you should sign up.  The information you’ll learn is incredible.

Perhaps what’s most exciting is that existing news sites and reviews guides are just scratching the surface of what’s possible with hyperlocal information.  Friend-finders like Foursquare, Gowalla and Loopt are finally starting to take off. But cool startups are working on defining whole new hyperlocal categories too: Deals, Nightlife, and even Casual Encounters!

In the deals category for example, Spotter by Yipit uses the foursquare API to find deals at the places you visit!  The result is an incredible daily deal newsletter that’s custom-tailored to where you live, work, and hang out. In a different category, Buzzd and Citysense are trying to track nightlife activity and tell you what’s ‘hot’ around you.  And let’s not forget Grindr, an iPhone app which facilitate sexual encounters between gay men.  The service has over 500,000 users and on a given day 30% log on.  Incredible traction.

Hyperlocal has finally come of age.  And seeing it go mainstream is going to be really fun.

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Embrace Google Maps/Transit

Google transit gives point-to-point directions using public transportation for over 400 cities.  The service especially shines on a mobile device.  Google maps on my iPhone was an indispensable part of navigating the city, helping me figure out exactly where and when to catch the buses.  I’m amazed by the number of people who don’t know their iPhone (and Android and some Blackberry phones) can do point-to-point train/subway/bus directions while incorporating the schedules too!

Get a Bike

Public transportation is great, but renting/borrowing a bike is a must.  Yes, it takes cajones to hop on and conquer the streets of a foreign city, but biking is without a doubt the best way to learn a new city.  You’ll cover much more ground than walking and avoid the headache of parking a car or waiting for public transportation.  Basically, you’ll get more done with your limited time.  And since bikes have zero variable cost, they strongly encourage exploration.  So go get lost on a bike! (but bring along your phone with Google Maps of course)

Connect with the Local Community

A few days before embarking, I asked the Austin Yelp community for suggestions of places to see and things to do.  “NYC Eliter Comin’ to Austin” garnered over 70 super helpful tips like: “6:30pm tuesday is the start of hippy hour at the continental club with the lovely miss toni price.”  Several of Austin’s fantastic Yelp members even sent me personal notes welcoming to the city.  If you weren’t already aware, I’m a big fan of Yelp and find it far and away the best source of hyperlocal information.

See the Heart of a Neighborhood

So you’ve picked a neighborhood to explore.  Great, but where exactly should you start?  Use Yelp to figure out the main commercial streets in a neighborhood!  From the homepage just click ‘search’ (leave the search box blank).  Then filter the list by “Most Reviewed” and maneuver the interactive map around your destination neighborhood.  Red pins will help call out the main streets!  Around the UT Austin campus, Guadalupe Street stood out as the clear winner (see picture on left).  This feature also works really well from Yelp’s fantastic iPhone app.

Find Must-See Popular Hotspots

Again, click ‘search’ on Yelp.com and leave the search box blank.  Setup the filters to sort by “Most Reviewed.”  This will show all Yelp listings in that city ranked by popularity.  For Austin, that includes Home Slice, Uchi, Guero’s, Polvo’s, and the flagship Whole Foods Market store.  In NYC, this list features Shake Shack, Magnolia Bakery, Ippudo, Pommes Frites, Katz’s Delicatessen, Grimaldi’s, Lombardi’s, and the Chicken & Rice Halal Cart at 53rd/6th.  You could certainly do worse as a tourist…

Find Weird Local Stuff

Most people know Yelp for its restaurant and bar listings.  But their ‘Local Flavor’ category has some seriously cool stuff.  Austin’s Local Flavor included the Cathedral of Junk, a massive three story structure created from decades of junk.  And my insider knowledge of the Bats Under the Congress Avenue Bridge seriously impressed the locals.  In San Francisco, this category led me to the Clarion Alley Murals and also the Seward Street Slides which turned out to be tremendously fun.

Bookmark Now, Retrieve Later

Bookmark places on Yelp.com that look interesting (you’ll need a yelp.com account to do so).  Then, from the Yelp iPhone App you can view those bookmarks on the go.  Best of all, the app shows your bookmarks ranked by proximity to your current location!  This is phenomenally helpful.

Log your Trip and Get Local Recommendations

I checked in on Foursquare at every place I went, despite having no Austin friends using the service.  Why?  Because afterwards I can view a minute by minute log of my trip on the history section of the Foursquare website! Equally cool, foursquare provided me great local recommendations.  Checking in at a random grocery prompted “Go to Green Mesquite and eat BBQ with friends!”  The tip was left by fellow NYC Foursquare user and friend Lee Semel and Green Mesquite was right down the block.  His trip to Austin occurred eight months prior but the virtual breadcrumbs remained!

Keep the Community Involved

Each night I updated the Yelp Forum with my accomplishments.  I also laid out my plan for the following day.  This united the Yelp community around my adventures and was really fun.  “You’re doing more things than most Austinites do in a year” wrote one Yelper. Seeing my plans even spurred Riki M., a former Brooklynite herself, to join me at the Cathedral of Junk.  The kindness of a tight-knit online community like Yelp is amazing.  Riki brought with her the Austin essentials: beer and bug spray.  And our mini picnic was fantastic — albeit buggy.

More Tips?

Since my trip, I’ve discovered plancast, which may prove very useful.  Readers: are there other tech tools I should be taking advantage of? Leave your thoughts and suggestions in the comments.  Thanks!

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A cross between a local business review site and a social networking site, Yelp encourages user transparency and discourages anonymity.  Like Amazon’s “Real Name” Badge, Yelp profiles are expected to have real names, real personal information, and real user photos — a requirement, in fact, to become Yelp elite.  Transparency makes it easy to distinguish trustworthy reviews (those written by active users with completed profiles and dozens of reviews under their belts) and untrustworthy reviews (those written by new users with few reviews and a question mark for their profile picture).

From the beginning, Yelp has attracted attention for mixing business and pleasure to build their brand among young people (see: business paradigm shifts and free tequila shots).  Yelp has created a grassroots movement, attracting thousands of reviewers and it has galvanized that userbase to write millions of reviews of local businesses.

Yelp hit a chord, creating a vibrant online community unlike any other I have ever seen — a community worthy of an entire NYTimes article!  I love Yelp because it’s one of a kind — how many online communities do you know in which the users regularly take their conversations offline, autonomously organizing events and meetups in the real world? (excluding the obvious exception of meetup.com where organizing meetups in the real world is the main objective)

Yelp is a phenomenon which may never occur again — online communities this active are unheard of, and twenty years from now I’m sure I’ll reminisce about how some website brought me together with complete strangers.  I’ll also look back on the good ol’ days when Yelp would spend their VC money on open bars at trendy clubs (a practice eerily reminiscent of the first dotcom bubble).

The profile page shows how many votes and compliments a user has received.

“OMG, it was total choco-gasm!” — the NYTimes points to this as representative of the crude reviews on Yelp.  But Yelp succeeds precisely because of witty quips like this.  They’re fun to read, and they’re fun to write.  Yelp gives its users a chance to exercise and develop their unique voice. Yelp is Xanga/Blogger for the 21st century.

Yelp is a form of self-expression (and also justification for trying new restaurants or ordering that extra dessert which sounds oh so good).  But users don’t want to write in a vacuum.  People want to be acknowledged for their contributions.  People want to know they’re making a difference in the lives of others.  And Yelp makes this happen with votes and compliments. As Becca S. notes,  “People tell you you’re cool, you’re funny, you’re a good writer.” The key to the Yelp equation is the successful gift economy centered around positive reinforcement from other users.

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