When we started GayCities with just a few cities and a handful of die-hard users, we imagined it becoming the place where like-minded people come together to discover the best and most relevant experiences in their town and everywhere. Today, there are 400,000 of you visiting the site each month and contributing, bringing us closer and closer to that vision.
We’re pleased with the progress, but there’s so much more we will do together. We’d love your feedback on what should be next, so here’s a sneak peek at what we’re focusing in the year ahead.
Mapping the whole world
Want to review that awesome new gastropub downtown? Checkin at the airport and see who’s there? You should be able to checkin anywhere and comment or become a fan of any place anywhere. Right now, your options are limited to our editorially created city guides. We’ve already integrated with Foursquare and Facebook, but we’re going to make every place in every city available to you.
A more social place
GayCities should be the place where offline word-of-mouth comes alive online and makes connecting to people and places easy. You already search for people, send messages and see other member Checkins, Events and Reviews. Do you want to see where your friends are going this weekend? Find that perfect guy to ask about his town? We’re adding more ways to see what people are up to and make it easier to join the conversation.
The world in your pocket
A lot of people know and love our iPhone app. It’s a constantly up-to-date view of people, places and events near you. Everything you can do on the GayCities site, you can do on our app. But we need to move to other platforms. Android, Blackberry and Windows 7 are all on our short-term plan.
What’s coming in the next few weeks?
- Search all our listings and events in all our city guides. We’ll make it easy to find exactly what you are looking for: a specific place or event, type of restaurant, or comments that other users have contributed.
- Like & Comment: We see so many thousands of great Reviews, “Count-me-ins” and Checkins on the site that we want you to be able to comment on them easily, just like on Facebook.
- Invite your friends: We’ll make it simple to invite your Facebook, Foursquare and Twitter friends to join the GayCities conversation.
- Lots of new cities – We’ll launch our 200th city shortly, and from there we’ve got over 50 more cities “on deck.” We’ll do that first–then move on to launching everywhere.
- And of course there are lots of refinements that we work on every day.
What would you like to see us do? Contribute to our idea list…
