Pushing Web 2.0 Toward It’s Semantic Future: Local Services YouGetIt and Meetro

As Web 2.0 moves more into the Semantic Web, the need to sort and interpret the constant flow of content becomes more and more critical. Social networks seem to grow exponentially every single day, and trying to meet up with people for business or pleasure becomes more difficult when you are searching for people you could realistically meet up with. Enter two new content aggregators who attempt to help you with exactly that task.

YouGetIt is one of these new services. Just launched in its beta release, YouGetIt is a web-based application that requires little more than your zip code to get you started with localization of everything from news and weather to people and business searches, as well as an events calendar, traffic reports, and coupons and classified ads.

The problems I had with YouGetIt began almost immediately; much like the rest of the country, YouGetIt seems to believe that all of New York State is right on top of New York City. A quick tour of the people finder looking for anyone in my area netted several people who were 0 miles away, yet lived in NYC's boroughs. Considering that I'm a good five-and-a-half hours from New York City, that wasn't much help. I found that the same issue cropped up no matter what feature of the site I was using, including the events calendar, which really isn't much help if I find an event that looks interesting only to discover it's 300 miles away.

The other new entry in this area is Meetro, which is out in its 1.0 release. Meetro is a downloadable application available for both PC as well as Mac platforms. Once you install Meetro, it will hook into your existing social networking applications as well as Instant Messaging to link you up automatically to your existing contacts; enter your MySpace login information, and your profile for Meetro will be created right from your MySpace profile page. The application runs in the background, alerting you when other Meetrians (I'm coining that term right now and would like to put Meetro on alert) message you. You can also meet up with people using the tools that who you people within certain distances from your entered location. You can also add in links to your Flickr Photostream, YouTube videos, and integrate your IM buddy lists within Meetro (the IM functionality isn't available yet in the Mac release). Meetro has tons of web site widgets, from a quick online status bar to miniMeetro, a smaller version of the client as a widget.

Both applications are currently hindered by the smallish user bases. In order to be relevant, especially to those of us in smaller metropolitan areas, both Meetro and YouGetIt require a critical mass of users. While I realize that I'm not in a large city, I'm still in an area with a metropolitan area approaching one million, and not a single person is nearby on either system. Meetro, however, did a nice job of presenting businesses nearby (even acknowledging that we live right on top of our favorite neighborhood deli that's only two streets over. In contrast, YouGetIt seems like it's trying to do everything at once, and without the service being populated, it looks like a large amount of nothing going on. With Meetro's more streamlined interface, there still weren't a lot of people or businesses, but it looked like more was available.

In order to really make these services work for their users, however, both companies are going to need to get their apps ready for the mobile platform. I find myself searching for restaurants and events from my phone more often than anywhere else. If I had to pick one that would run on my RAZR, it would probably be Meetro, which seems closer to a mobile app than YouGetIt. I hope the folks at Meetro are listening.