Nextstop is a website that lets people find, discover and share cool places to eat, visit or hang out in cities all over the world, and today the company is launching a fully-optimized iPhone website that will make it easy for you to do just that directly from your phone, using geolocation.
HTML5 In Action
I talked to the founders of Nextstop yesterday, and they said that when developing a mobile version of the site, the biggest goal was to make the experience fast. Although they considered building a separate app specifically for Nextstop, they decided to take advantage of HTML5 and CSS3 features to make the site look and feel more like a native iPhone app, while having the ability to cache more data and keep the experience more consistent.
Watch this video to get a sense of how the site works:
Worldwide Focus
One of the downsides of the bigger location recommendation services is that they have a very U.S.-centric focus. If you're in Italy or China or Australia, options and recommendations are more limited. To that end, Nextstop has embraced and cultivated a very world-centric approach. Its community has created nearly 1,000 tours of different places around the world -- think of it like a travel guide -- and the places that are shared and recommended are often local-approved.
Even in my own city -- Atlanta -- I was impressed that, aside from a few mainstays, most of the recommendations were for excellent restaurants and places often missing from the more tourist-centric lists.
Nextstop is small now, but it's growing. Meanwhile, its technically impressive web app (it just works with the iPhone right now, but there have been reports that it works on the Droid as well), as well as its commitment to the worldwide community, make this one impressive tool.