Please consider welcoming Placewire
Placewire is a new website which is like Instagram for neighborhood news. If you live in the USA:
- Go to placewire.co and sign in, ideally on your phone.
- Follow your neighborhood and others you work or hang out in.
- Add a photo. When you’re walking around and see something interesting — something happening, something new, something busted, etc.— take a photo and put it on Placewire. If it would be interesting to hear about from a neighbor, it belongs on Placewire.
After that, you can check out your feed, and mark interesting posts by double tapping them.
Origin story below. Thanks for trying Placewire!
Placewire is a new website for sharing interesting neighborhood information and gossip via photo sharing. Today we’re launching in the neighborhoods of Manhattan, Brooklyn and Queens.
I spent ten years working at a network of city blogs across the USA that were fed by a ferocious community of email tipsters. While I was kept far away from actually writing anything, I looked at the tips people in NYC would send in anyway, because the stuff that came through (the photo of a pre-opening Momofuku Ko taken through a seam in the papered-over windows, or a Red Hook building owner sawing a Banksy piece out of his wall in order to take it to a Miami art fair, et al.) was strange and delightful. I came to realize that there was a lot of interesting information that could be shared in a picture and a few words.
Everyone likes good dope about their neighborhood, but when you spot something of interest, it doesn’t fit on the social apps you have today — your sorority sisters on Facebook and the lifestyle pornographers from work on Instagram probably don’t care about the new dog run in your park, or the manhole fire you spotted on your way to the train because you probably don’t live in the same place. On Placewire you follow and post photos into the neighborhoods where you live, work, or go to buy weed.
After you pick a few neighborhoods to follow on Placewire, you’ll have a feed, a pattern which may be familiar from every other application you’ve signed up for and stopped using in the last five years. When you see something informative pop up, you can indicate your approval by double tapping it. Posts that get the most interest circulate into nearby neighborhoods, or can go citywide.
But why restrict yourself to consuming great content? Placewire’s success depends on the free labor of its users. Clicking the large blue button at the top of the home screen will allow you to upload a photo and a caption. If you’re looking for guidance on what kind of content is (and is not good) for Placewire, please check out this page.
Caveats!
- As a product whose relevance relies on a large number of highly engaged, geographically distributed participants who do not yet exist, you may find things a little thin contentwise today. Take control! Post some stuff! Send your friends the link!
- I am sorry if we are not yet in the city or town you want us to be, but if you let us know where that is, we’ll be sure to get there.
- The website itself was designed by a programmer. But not this logo by Rick Froberg, which you could add to your homescreen right now:
Please try out Placewire! Thank you for your time.
