Unilocus.com

Unilocus is a Spanish social network aimed at University students that launched in May, founded by Mario Alvarez y Marzban Cooper here in Barcelona.

During the summer I worked with Mario, Marzban and team on the development of the Unilocus product, which meant improving the user experience in the short term and planning for new functionality in the mid to long term.

You can see the result of that work online now in Unilocus.

Eat Barcelona

Several years ago I had a blog called Eat Barcelona that I used to review all the restaurants I had frequented here. It was a surprising success and had a lot of visitors. I continued to tweak it, migrated to WordPress and it carried on, however I lost it entirely during a denial of service attack on the hosting company (my fault, it was something like 5 euros for 500 years of hosting).

I’ve thought a lot about relaunching it and finally I’ve got EatBarcelona.com up and running again, this time it is not a personal blog but a site where anybody can add and review a restaurant in Barcelona.

Please take a look and tell me what you think, register and review restaurants! You can add your own restaurants but if this seems to much like hard work I can add them for you and send you back the link for you to review (you’ll need to send me your list of restaurants that you want adding).

On a technical note the site has been made with Drupal by Javier and the crew at Alquimia.

Drinking is the new Travel

Another Social Network for wine lovers called Adegga launches, you can read about it at Mashable.

Wine and Drink must be competing with Travel to be the most overly populated Social Network sector. Somebody should launch a traveling wine buff’s Social Network. You heard it here first.

links for 2007-03-27

• Food bloggers dish up plates of spicy criticism / Formerly formal discipline of reviewing becomes a free-for-all for online amateurs
  “The posts “nearly killed my business,” said Kridech, a native of France who has worked in the food industry for 25 years and spent $150,000 revamping the Senses space. “Everyone has become a food critic. They think they’re real big shots. They probably c
  (tags: yelp local food reviews)

links for 2007-03-09

• Rory Sutherland: Media Agencies own the future
  “By and large, the easiest way to charge extra for something abstract is to attach it to something concrete. That is why, for instance, a pub with a nice view will charge more for the beer – it doesn’t sell beer at standard prices and then add on the view
  (tags: advertising revenue)

links for 2007-02-28

• Step Right Up, Start A Community Site
  “The balancing act between revenue and membership growth may wipe out “the niche player aura that made the sites attractive in the first place.”
  (tags: SocialNetwork Socialnetworking verticalnet niche)

links for 2007-02-25

• 83 Beautiful WordPress Themes You (Probably) Haven’t Seen | Smashing Magazine
  (tags: WordPress themes Blog)

links for 2007-02-22

• Lavanguardia.es – Noticias, actualidad y ?ltima hora – Internacional – Ir?n mantiene su desaf?o al Consejo de Seguridad y no interrumpe el enriquecimiento de uranio
  (tags: iran, spanish)

links for 2007-02-21

• Delightful Blogs :: a discerning directory of delightful blogs on shopping, fashion, design, travel, food, family, work, music, pets and much more
  “Explore our edited directory of 1042 blogs that are personal, passionate and stylish.”
  (tags: blogs directory inspiration reference)

Affinity Circles launches BasketBall Community

A while back I talked about Affinity Circles and how I admired their model. Now they’ve expanded their taget market with the launch of I am A Trail Blazers Fan, a dedicated Social Network for the Portland, Oregon Basketball Team.

I think it’s a good move and is especially exciting if they can create lots of these focussed communities and join them into one big one, like they are doing within the educational space.

Sports is an obvious area for social media, and there’s a lot happening within the sports area, I’ll save that for another post.