MapQuest Maps Neighborhoods Provides a Social Sharing Experience With mqVibe... 

mqVibe (Beta) is a cool neighborhood mapping resource providing neighborhood hotspots, business rankings, user reviews and more... best of all, the service has a tight facebook integration making it simple and fast to get started - simply login via facebook connect. at the heart of the service is the idea of neighborhood and neighborhood maps - a great way to navigate this social mapping service and something the user will relate to.

By default mqvibe will take you to Denver, Colorado, home of Mapquest. As a testbed I went a little further North to Fort Collins,CO.,  a favorite place of mine, and began looking around. Using a basemap that highlights neighborhoods (I find this to be a very user-friendly way to navigate) I can easily locate popular areas of FOCO by jumping to a link of a neighborhood that is familiar to me. As a starting point I elect to look around Old Town. Once you visit a neighborhood map, the service then displays popular spots in the region as determined by "Best of" a user voted directory of best places. Clicking on a place then brings up some information including business name, complete address, and a link to their website. Additionally, each business has a vibe rank and the user has the ability to give a thumbs up or down. Now here's where it gets very cool, and social - something for business owners to take note of - clicking a thumbs up for a rating brings up a dialog box where the user can then enter some comments. Once selected the comment and place listing can be shared on a facebook wall and then sent directly to friends so they can like it and share! As a starting point I would highly suggest that any business like and share their vibe listing on their facebook to bring attention of the resource to their fans. What I find very clever is that in my list of suggested friends to share the listing with, my Colorado-based friends appear at the top... totally huge and this really makes sense since I'm sharing a Colorado resource... nice!

mqVibe provides POI listings for a number of categories including restaurants, shopping, activities, local services, beauty shops, health and medical, travel, and the "Best of" category.. At this time what I'm unsure of is how to locate a venue that is not currently listed in the Best of directory. For example, a relatively new brewery in Fort Collins is Funkwerks. Because they are new they don't appear in the database at this time, however, the business owner would likely want their place made available for people to vote on and Like. Doing this via the map interface is not apparent, however, if you notice at the page bottom there's a link to "Add a new business" http://listings.mapquest.com/apps/listing - it may be a good idea for any business owner to take the time to add their listing to the mapquest database by creating a mapquest merchant account.

At the heart of mqVibe is the ranking of neighborhoods and places. This from mapquest... Vibe Score: The Vibe Score is a proprietary ranking used to profile 50,000 neighborhoods, 27,000 cities and 50,000 hotspots within MapQuest Vibe. To help put rankings into perspective, each score is generated by interactions on MapQuest.com, cartographic analysis and user signals to derive proprietary MapQuest neighborhood characteristics such as:

-Popularity: A measurement of how many visitors come to the neighborhood compared with other neighborhoods in the state
-Going Out: The variety, quantity, and quality of bars, restaurants, nightclubs, and other entertainment venues in the neighborhood
-Residential: A comparison of the number of homes in the neighborhood with the number of businesses
-Burby: The neighborhood’s commercialized nature considering things like the prevalence of national chains
-Edgy: Determination of how likely an area has grittier or colorful aspects of urban society in that neighborhood
-Walkability: A guide to how easy it is to access common daily amenities in the neighborhood without needing to drive to a place

Vibe Rank: Vibe Score is compiled through a variety of Vibe Ranks on restaurants, shopping, services and more, as well as the hotspots. Through a number of different signals, MapQuest Vibe ranks POIs and the neighborhoods that contain them based on the social and local interactions.

According to Mapquest, a planned smartphone app is in the works and coming soon... stay tuned (an iPhone iOS app mention is made on the website). Note, at this time mqvibe only maps USA neighborhoods.

My Opinion

Overall, mqvibe is a fun way to explore areas of interest and the Best of picks provide some very nice and useful starting points. The social connectivity and sharing capabilities are terrific and this service should catch on well. The only item of concern at the moment is the lack of information or ability to search, rank, and share information about places that are yet to be considered a TOP spot. First impressions though are pretty darned good... I'll be back!

MapQuest Vibe Launches to Connect Consumers with the Best Local Experiences

http://www.mqvibe.com/