F You Global Corporations
F YOU. That’s all I could say when I come across “truelocal.com.au.”:http://truelocal.com.au This site is going toe-to-toe with sensis’ “Whereis.com.au”:http://whereis.com.au which are both local search directories. At these sites you can, for example, search for a doctor in your suburb and it comes back with a list of doctors. Click on a doctor and you follow through to road maps etc.
The rant begins…
First of all, News Limited is owned by News Corporation who is owned by Rupert Murdoch. So with these wads of cash you think they could get it right yeh? but no. So what’s my issue with truelocal?
Well, at a glance this site is a clone of whereis.com with a nicer interface. Where’s the innovation? I thought for a second that I was going to see Web 2.0 ushered in to the mainstream in Australia, but no. No doubt the site forms part of News Limited’s strategy to stick their stake in the local search market. So strategy wise that seems fine, and now people can use truelocal instead of whereis if they want to do local search in Australia. But, contrast these sites with “Google Maps.”:http://maps.google.com At Google Maps they employ cutting edge technology that actually kicked off a mini bubble called “Web 2.0″. There’s advanced use of technology in Google Maps that leaves whereis and truelocal for dead. Why couldn’t truelocal come out with their own version of Google Maps? It’s not _that_ hard.
The way I see it is that Google is run by nerds with business skill, but News Ltd is run by business people who have hired nerds to get some work done. Google are up with technology and technology is “their thing”, while News Ltd is bubbling with “business” people who understand business better than they do technology. Hence why I think truelocal lacks any technological innovation that would add to it’s strategic play. Imaging if they came out with a Google Maps clone for Australia – they would get far more press, people would have good reasons to prefer their site over whereis, plus a bunch of other stuff.
Out of curiousity I opened up the source code and saw this:
This is bad! For the majority of people they will not care, but this stuff defines a company. If you’re producing bad code, what else are you doing wrong? This is like code that was dug up from the 1990’s. Something better (though not the best) would be: