Borrowed Sugar (local news and discussion website)
July 16, 2011 by Julia
Filed under Austin Metro, Community, websites
There are no shortage of Central Texas news websites, and Borrowed Sugar is an East Austin start-up that puts a spin on local news. For those of you familiar with Babycenter or City-Data, Borrowed Sugar incorporates the idea of community forums into a news aggregate site. It’s similar to the Community Impact newspaper but adds a virtual bulletin board, forum, and events calendar.
To set up an account, it required input of one’s full address. I’m not really in the habit of putting in my home address to websites so I put in the address of the nearest grocery store to my house. That put me in the geographic location for news that would be of interest to me. I found that when I created a second account with another address out in the ‘burbs of Austin, the website also pulled news specific to that city. When I asked another mama-t0-be who lives in the southwest part of town to test try, she said that Borrowed Sugar targeted her neighborhood properly but pulled headlines and events for south Austin that weren’t as relevant to her neck of the woods as the Community Impact newspaper. I do have to agree with that assessment. Community Impact is one of my favorite local publications, and Borrowed Sugar doesn’t quite have the depth yet. It does pull headlines from CI though.
Though the local Q&A boards are not currently populated with a lot of questions just yet, I can see how users can target others in the neighborhood outside of one’s own subdivision discussion groups that may be set up in neighborhood websites or online groups. The virtual Bulletin Board feature is likely where I might comb for potentially interesting information for Little Austinite. It’s like Craigslist except there hasn’t been many (any?) posts yet that I can see.
There is a tab for something called “Sidewalk Sale” that seems to pull from the popularity of coupon deal websites like Groupon and LivingSocial. Borrowed Sugar looks for deals in the neighborhood and passes that along. I didn’t see any Sidewalk Sales yet so I don’t really know for sure how that works or would look like.
The idea behind Borrowed Sugar is good. It’s a website that combines social networking and news with local sensibilities. It just doesn’t have a lot of people on it right now. I do like the look of Borrowed Sugar, and this may become another resource for parents to look for things to do with their kids or a place to ask questions. After their nationwide launch (soon) and having more users sign on, I’ll be interested to see if this thing has any legs.
http://borrowedsugar.com/
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