Here was my experience with Nearby.

The Woodstock Hippie
So I loaded up Nearby. Very nice and slick, and great presentation. I love the fact that you could quite easily make modifications to your current location by moving the map and not the icon, genius!

Then I thought I’d look for something… well anything. So I started by searching for a nearby Cuban restaurant by typing in ‘Cuban’ , the results were random. No sign of the Cuban restaurant literally a block or so away, but it did show me the name Margon’s at around 6th and 46th… much further uptown. To be specific… it didn’t tell me the first thing about Margon’s… just the word “Margon’s” and the helpful fact that it was “1,071 meters from you” and “posted by funkeboodha a while ago”. Now even if I was BFF with Mr. Funkeboodha, I am still not sure I’d haul my butt up to 6th and 46th (1,071 meters no less!) and give it a try based on that info.

After a web search it turns out that Margon’s is a little hole in the wall Cuban restaurant that may indeed be worth trying, but that’s not the point, it wasn’t particularly nearby (particularly versus alternatives) and didn’t give me enough information to make a decision either way.

Ok, so then I figured maybe Nearby is not a great tool for finding restaurants so let me just go with the flow and explore what’s popular with the Nearby community… maybe there is exciting stuff happening all around me that I never realized before! So I tap on the ‘Popular’ button and tap on the first little blue post it note I see nearby called ‘Tiger’ which brings me to two posts “Tiger” and “Winky”. One tap deeper I learn that Tiger is a dead cat (including a picture of him before he was dead), and that Winky seems to be an alive Persian cat that evidently got to sit in Santa’s lap this past holiday season…. And that they both live a mere 540 meters away around 32nd street, between 2nd and 3rd! Woo hoo, now we’re getting somewhere!

Ok, so moving right along, I gave it one last try by trying to explore the Nearby “collections”. A collection seems to be a set of POIs around a common them, posted by a Nearby community member… alas finally a little organization! This area seems particularly popular with people posting their favorite restaurants, buildings, and things to do for their friends to see. Besides many personal favorite things to do and and see, nearby collections for me included Great Buildings (5 in total in NYC including Chelsea Market), Important Protests (2 in total), Grand Tour Architecture (3 in total). Lame, Lame and Lame.

So you can see why visions of hippies come to mind… I can hear them now… “aw sure man, it’s cool, you can post anything you want man, anything! No rules at all, if you want to make a map of all the places where you and Yoko did sit in’s in 1965 and quit halfway through go right ahead… it’s all cool man. No worries”

And that is exactly what you get, a big muddy mess.