Posted by Philippe
Great news! You can now discover great businesses in your neighborhood right from the frontpage!
The more complete the business’ profile page is, the better it will rank. The idea is that a more complete profile page will help you decide more easily if the place is worth it or not.
There’s also an internal ranking system which will bring up the score for businesses reviewed by “top reviewers”.
Posted by Philippe
Last night we finished some Facebook integration. It’s basically an application that will let Ourbis figure out links between people and let you search in your friends bookmarks.
The idea is basically this: if you bookmark ~5 businesses you like. And all your friends bookmark ~5 businesses too. It’ll quickly grow into a HUGE database of information!
Even if your friend doesn’t actually review the business (write text) but just bookmarks it, it’s still an indication over another that it might be worth to look at this particular one over another (unless it’s rated 1!)
Feel free to email us if you have suggestions, comments, etc. And we hope you will participate!
If you’re wondering, we used the RFacebook gem and Rails plugin, but modified it a little bit so it doesn’t takeover our whole application (the filters are not controller-by-controller).
Posted by Philippe
I've been playing with GIS data of Canada recently and thought it would be a good idea to plot areas in cities where we have "Ourbis coverage".
These images will eventually end up on the cities' and provinces' portal on Ourbis.com to show which areas have been covered.
The black dots represent businesses. The red circles (bigger) show businesses for which we have a photo, review or description. The more red the circle/path is, the more businesses are covered in that area.
You can see what it looks like in the following cities for now:
If you're wondering about all the holes in Montréal: I did not draw the city coverage of the "greater montreal area", so it does not include the cities that haven't merged into Montréal a few years ago.
Posted by Philippe
There's a couple new features on Ourbis, including the ability to see all the changes to the directory (link on the frontpage). Also, you can now see other people's contributions, and an iGoogle widget.
Posted by Jocelyn
With this release, Ourbis goes nation-wide with a complete Canada coverage.
Add to this a more usable interface and improvments all over the place, we now offer a great way to find and promote local businesses.
Don't hesitate to send us feedback!
Posted by Jocelyn
Ourbis just got a major facelift. But changes made to the site go much deeper than just good look. This new brew brings you real user profiles with avatars, recent activity, improved search (including suggestions), RSS feeds, and much more!
We would like to thank all our users for the tremendous feedback that helped us make Ourbis even better. Enjoy!
Posted by Jocelyn
We just launched Ourbis.com! Covering the great Montreal area to start, with over 100,000 businesses, Ourbis brings you new ways to find and discover local businesses.
Not from the Montréal area? Don't worry, Ourbis aims at growing fast and you can contribute to this. Feel free to enter the businesses you like anywhere in Canada.
Ourbis site tour / Guide d'Ourbis
Philippe's Ourbis profile and address book
Jocelyn's Ourbis profile and address book
