While AOL spends mega-millions on rolling out patches of hyperlocal sites across the country, Fwix is debuting a new strategy that focuses on aggregating news and information about places – automatically. “We are automating Patch and building richer places pages and city pages,” CEO Darian Shirazi told TechCrunch.
Fwix lets users zoom from cities to towns to neighborhoods, as well as places like landmarks and businesses. On a neighborhood page, for example, you’ll find aggregated local news and blog posts, as well as events, business reviews, Flickr photos and geolocated tweets. It also aggregates city data from SpotCrime, FixMyStreet and SeeClickFix. A map illustrates hot places, as measured by check-ins, tweets and news appearing for the place.
“We want to build a timeline of what’s happening for every geo-point on the planet,” said Fwix CEO Darian Shirazi. “This is really the first four-dimensional view of the world and, combined with our search technology, we believe we’ve built the ultimate hyperlocal product.”
(Full disclosure: I work for msnbc.com, which owns EveryBlock.com, a similar site that aggregates local news and data at the block level.)