So here’s a little bit of information about an up-an-coming app called Local Zip News. You can get the app for free in the market and access the same data at www.localzipnews.com.
The main idea behind this nifty little app is that people from your own town will post local news that you might not find out about otherwise. The topics they list are Shopping Tips, Traffic, Community Events, Local News, Lost Pets and Local Business Offers.
I think this app has a lot of potential. It reminds me of Craigslist with its simplicity and completely user-driven model.
Pros
- Find news by zip, city & state, and automatic location
- Filter searches by category
- Posting news is painless and fast
Cons
- Automatic location searching and posting didn’t work for me
- Barebones design (no way to report spam in the app, hyperlinks aren’t clickable, etc)
- Nobody uses it at all
Seriously, that last one is the biggie here. I would guess 99% of cities have no posts for them. This is to be expected with a new app; you can’t write an app that’s populated by users and have it instantly be populated. But at the same time, it’s a news app, so it’s pretty worthless without news. However, that’s where you come in. Users have to post news for this app to be worth anything, so do just that! Download it for free and start posting news for your area. Take a look at LA’s news feed for some ideas.
Overall, this app has a little way to go. It’s a nice idea, but the app itself needs to be fleshed out with more features. And, above all, it needs news posts.
Example of some posts from the LA feed
Posting using the automatic location feature didn’t work for me
Hyperlinks like these end up being pretty useless in the app
Longer posts like this one can be kind of annoying. It would be nice if each post had a headline and a body. Longer posts could show the headline and a couple of lines of the body, but require you to click on it to see the whole post.
Get this App
Here’s the App Brain QR code so you can check out this app for yourself:
