Hey Brooklyn, you can take a Scenic Route walk now! You can too, Austin. Yep, even you Palo Alto! Any U.S. city that has recommendations on nextstop.com is open for mobile on-demand walking tours from Scenic Route! All thanks to nextstop.com’s API and Gabe’s mashup mastery [1].

We’re really excited about this update because nextstop.com is as good at collecting awesome bite-sized tips and local knowledge as Scenic Route is at delivering it. The mashup makes it more fun to access nextstop.com’s content while also helping us grow from 1 city to a gazillion cities literally overnight. Nextstop is committed to helping people within a community find and share experiences they love (not just stores or restaurants), which is why we chose to use their API instead of the many other great ones out there. Nextstop obviously loves cities and has great respect for the people who enjoy them. Read more about nextstop’s vision here.

If you have a smartphone with a mobile browser, give it a try. We can’t wait to hear what you think!

To get you up a running (er, walking), a little more information about the changes:

More Cities! From the main website and the mobile website, you can now change your city using a pulldown menu. There are lots and lots of cities! Let us know if your favorite U.S. city is missing. Just because it’s not there doesn’t mean it can’t be!

More Messages! Messages listed as being from Scenic Route authors “nextstop.com” are the ones we’ve pulled in with netstop’s API. When you look at an individual message from the main website or the mobile website, you’ll see that we credit the nextstop user. These people are really awesome, and we encourage you to link to their nextstop profile to see what other local treasures they’ve shared with the world! As an example, the Scenic Route message to the right is from nextstop user FranceskaLynne.

More Walks! And when you’re out and about, you have the same freedom with your mobile browser. Simply open up scenicroute.info, select your current city, and enter in your current address and destination. You’ll have an option to take walks based only on recommendations from the nextstop.com community. We think it’s fun to mix it up with a “grab bag” walk, though, so you can get messages from Scenic Route folks too. Or, if any of the available tags speak to you (burlesque?!), give them a whirl!.

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[1]
Mashup: “a web page or application that uses or combines data or functionality from two or many more external sources to create a new service. The term mashup is primarily used to describe a remix of digital data. It implies easy, fast integration, frequently using open APIs and data sources to produce enriching results that were not the original reason for producing the raw source data.” (from the wikipedia)

Gabe’s Mastery Thereof: Gatsby, which “introduces you to nearby people with interests you share, whenever you check in on foursquare,” has been getting great attention from press and users these last few weeks (as if you needed more proof!).