OurFaves

Last year, the OurFaves gang has a super time attending the mesh conference - hearing some of the world’s foremost technical, marketing, media, and creative innovators speak on where the web is headed and how technology is influencing society, business, and all sectors of creativity and communication.

At last year’s mesh, OurFaves had launched only a couple of weeks before the conference. This year, we’re really looking forward to spreading the word about how the site has grown, and connecting with and learning from even more amazing thinkers and doers who are harnessing the power of the internet in new ways.

Other exciting stuff: our own Candice Faktor, creator of OurFaves and GM of both OurFaves and toronto.com will be speaking on one of the panels, alongside Pema Hegan of GigPark and Daniel Burka of Digg.com. The topic of the panel will be The New Front Page, and here’s what it’s all about:

In the past, the front page of the newspaper or the TV news was our main source of information. Now, as media becomes social, we are just as likely to see a link on Digg or StumbleUpon, or get sent one through Pownce, or see one on a friend’s blog. Is this a good thing or a bad thing? Some feel this is making us more narrow in our interests, as we see only the content our friends agree is important, but others see these “recommendation engines” as a positive thing. Join Daniel Burka of Digg, Pema Hegan of GigPark and Candice Faktor of OurFaves in a discussion about how the Web is the new front page, moderated by Mathew Ingram.

We hope to see some of you there! And if web/society 2.0 and 3.0 are of interest to you, we’d highly recommend you come.

Ourfaves is 1 year old today - Yeeeeeeehaaaa! What a great feeling to reach 1 years old and to be growing strong - we hit a record traffic month again for April 08! Thank you so much to everyone who has helped make ourfaves.com the awesome community it is  - without you, Ourfaves would not be useful at all. Stay tuned as a party to celebrate is in the works - can’t wait to share the deets soon. I couldn’t ask for a better way to celebrate our birthday than to see all the amazing momentum that is building at ourfaves.com. In the past month, our team has doubled in size, the enthusiasm and energy in the office is totally contagious, we have some amazing plans to build out the platform and the community, local businesses are giving us the nod on what a great job we are doing spreading word of mouth online, we are eagerly getting other cities ready to launch and the original team is back at it! So happy birthday to us - and thanks to everyone for getting us here - we can’t wait for Year 2!

It seems like only yesterday we announced the birth of a tiny beta, launched into the web 2.0 world by its committed young creators - all of whom really had no idea what to expect next.

In a year’s time we’ve gone from a fledgling community to a site with over 2300 registered users, nearly 10,000 fave entries, and 170,000 unique visitors this month alone. We’d really like to take this opportunity to say thank you to all the enthusiastic contributors and OurFaves community members, the many awesome people who have helped to build, grow and support the site, and to all of Toronto for just being so damn amazing and fave-worthy.

The OurFaves crew hit the town a couple times this week in celebration of a great year, and a great city.

Have a look at some photos from our adventures at the SummerCamp Dance Party at CiRC A, a super event that brought together Toronto’s art, design, communications, technology, media, social change and entrepreneurship communities. And peek in at our night at the “I GET T.O.” party at the Gladstone - a night celebrating Jane Jacobs’ legacy and spring in the city, co-sponsored by Green Enterprise Toronto and PEN Canada.

And get set for more fun in the city - we’ll soon be announcing plans for our birthday party! Stay tuned.

We are thrilled to announce that Wendy Goldman has decided to join the Ourfaves team as Editorial and Community Coordinator. Wendy did such a great job as an intern on toronto.com that we couldn’t let her go! Her passion, enthusiasm, talented journalism and new media skills made her the perfect fit for our team. We have some amazing projects that we can’t wait to get started when Wendy starts which fortunately for us is on Monday!

…our new hire, Tim Leung joins us! I am so excited to announce that we have hired one of the best
young developers and product people I know. Tim is no stranger to Ourfaves, having worked as a summer student on the project in its earliest days of conception. Tim couldn’t stay away even while at school and worked on a part time basis helping us. We haven’t had Tim work on Ourfaves for over a year and so we are super excited to have him join us full time. This means great things for the Ourfaves
platform. Tim is resting up and vacationing this week as he knows there is some hard work and hard play ahead. 3 days and counting till he arrives!

We have printed some really awesome stickers for businesses that have been faved on our site. We are super excited about sharing Ourfaves place pages of faves with businesses. Most businesses will likely not know that our site exists yet and that they have users who absolutely love particular things about their establishment. What a great good news story to share. We are just finishing up printing the stickers and we will be in market by the next week visiting the top 50 places faved on our site with some good news about how much the people of Toronto love their business.

I am really excited to hear what these business owners have to say and to see ourfaves.com “static clings” (aka stickers that don’t permanently stick) be placed in some of my fave store windows around town. This program really embodies what ourfaves is all about - community, supporting local businesses, being in the know about the best and highlighting the real specialities that people may not know about a place. I am hoping these stickers get people talking and engaging with the businesses about what is favorite at their establishment.

Can’t wait to start spreading the word and look forward to sharing some of our encounters with faved local businesses with you!

There’s a new bookmarking feature on OurFaves, called Save it! As you browse through the site and come across faves for things and places that you want to try, click ’save it’ to add it to your list. This a great way to remind yourself of that great martini bar that you want to check out next weekend, or the used bookstore you can never remember the name of. Your list of saved places is viewable by everyone (the ability to make this page private will be in a future release), so hopefully your friends will check out your list the next time they want to take you out for dinner or drinks

We made a couple key improvements on the site at the end of last week. For anyone who was previously gnashing their teeth in frustration whilst browsing through a multi-page list of faves, I have good news for you: paging has been fixed. You can now easily go from page to page in a multi-page list, link off the list and back again to the same spot you left from, and bookmark specific pages.

We also improved the way you create faves by incorporating some handy hints which will hopefully be easier for the new folks, as well as making it more obvious how to go about adding a location to our database.

As well, while we enabled RSS on personal pages a while back, we’ve made the links a bit more obvious and added a page with some links to help you start sharing your recent faves on your blog through RSS.

We are continuing to work on both improvements to the existing site and building some new features, so stay tuned, and if you have a nagging pet peeve or a great idea for a new feature, drop us a line and let us know about it!

We’ve been working on many new features and improvements here at OurFaves, and one of the biggest is search. We’ve just launched our new search results which are better organized to let you quickly and easily find just what you’re looking for across the site, whether it be a person, place or thing. And this is just the beginning…we will be adding more features like filtering by category or neighbourhood, and maps of all the places in the near future. In the meantime, give it a whirl and let us know what you think so we can incorporate your feedback into the next round of updates.

We are delighted!  And here’s what they had to say…

“Toronto based OurFaves.com seeks to combine city search, social networking, and user-generated content in a one stop destination for a particular city.

City search and profile sites aren’t new. Where OurFaves differs is a focus on user-generated content…”

Read the rest at: http://www.techcrunch.com/2007/05/14/ourfaves-word-of-mouth-meets-city-search/