It’s a city . . . it’s a waboo . . . it’s CityWaboo! No, I don’t have a clue what the name means, but a new “community resource site” has launched in beta.
Eduard Arakelyan, a co-founder of CityWaboo, explained what he intends to do with the site. “Our goal is to provide communities with a valuable resource tool to quickly find information while also helping businesses build their customer base with local and national exposure,” Arakelyan wrote in a statement.
And that customer base has the potential to become quite wide – CityWaboo covers all sorts of ground. Yellow pages, news, events, jobs (courtesy of CareerBuilder.com), classifieds, weather, real estate (powered by Realtor.com), maps, and a “business corner” – pretty much every aspect of the community is there.
Well, everything except the community itself, that is. Like most newer sites, CityWaboo’s user population is a little lacking. Yet the “beta” tag is an encouraging sign – the CityWaboo team is not trying to foist this off as a finished product – and as a press release stated, “Visitors can now browse CityWaboo.com and try key features and services while the site’s functionality is continuously tested and improved.”
Business might do well to get their names on the site during this period, considering that “basic business listings” are free. “Enhanced packages” do have a price tag, though – $39.95 per month.
And on one other slightly discouraging note, I’ve discovered a possible meaning for CityWaboo. “Waboo,” by itself, at least, means “Internet (Web) taboo,” according to Urban Dictionary.
UPDATE: As explained by Eduard Arakelyan in an email to Murdok, CityWaboo is “a name that we chose to stimulate conversation. For example turn to your co worker right now and say CityWaboo, the first sentence out of his or her mouth would be City What!? That is exactly what we want people’s reaction to be. This gives us a chance to embed the site name right from the get go.”
