Minneapolis/St. Paul

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Paved With Good Intentions CitySearch prepares to replace Sidewalk with something more concrete
Image By Daniel Ruen

Sidewalk, the highly touted online entertainment guide that Seattle software giant Microsoft pumped up fast and deflated even faster, is scheduled to fade away next month, absorbed by its new owner, Ticketmaster Online-CitySearch. The switchover will mark the end of Sidewalk's presence in the Twin Cities and about 70 other cities across the United States. But more than that, it will mark the end of a vision of the Internet that never really took off.

In the Twin Cities, Sidewalk's demise is likely to be less jarring than elsewhere in the nation. While Microsoft has maintained its local arts-and-entertainment guide here since July 1997, CitySearch, based in Pasadena, California, had not yet rolled out a Twin Cities site when the sale was announced in July. (The $280 million deal was finalized this past week.) People accustomed to searching Sidewalk for movie listings or restaurant reviews will see pretty much the same information on the CitySearch site, just in a different format, explains Tom McInerney, CitySearch's chief financial officer. "It will be less dramatic than in cities where we were already, because there you're blending two different city guides." Adding to the local continuity is the fact that five of the seven current full-time Sidewalk employees will stay on with CitySearch, McInerney says.

But while people will find at CitySearch many of the same concert calendars and sports stories they saw on Sidewalk, the new site will also be prominently peppered with something Microsoft didn't offer: lots of little Ticketmaster icons that invite browsers to buy tickets online at the click of a mouse. And that, industry watchers say, is the greatest indication of the change truly at hand: from content to commerce.

In late 1996, as he was putting the finishing touches on the St. Paul Pioneer Press's new Pioneer Planet Web site, David Fryxell was wooed away to Sidewalk as its first Twin Cities employee. His job was to get the Internet amalgam of local newspaper and city guidebook up and running here. "It was an interesting integration," Fryxell reminisces. "Changing-content stories on top of the most complete guide in the Twin Cities that had been built at the time--it was really an incredibly deep, rich information resource. If you wanted a lake to canoe at, a theater to go to, we'd have the information. We ultimately wanted to expand to cover other content beyond entertainment kinds of things."

Those were the Web's early years, when large companies like Microsoft and U S West, as well as startups like the then little-known California company CitySearch, rushed to offer local content on the Internet. The assumption was that local content, and local "communities" online, would boom. But they didn't. And neither did the advertising dollars that companies like Microsoft had counted on.

"In the Web world, local information is not the most popular thing people are looking for," says Peter Krasilovsky, program director for the Kelsey Group, a New Jersey Internet consulting firm. "It's not the equivalent of what we see as the newspaper in the 1950s."

When ad revenue failed to materialize, changes began popping up on city-guide sites in general, and Sidewalk in particular. Last fall what had begun as an arts-and-entertainment guide shifted toward yellow-pages-style directories and shopping, chasing the Internet's new dream, electronic commerce. Fryxell was gone by then, having moved to Cincinnati to manage a group of arts magazines and Web sites. But he'd seen the change coming: "I could sense that there was less enthusiasm on the part of Microsoft for the kind of site it had started out to be. The executives who came in had more of a background in shopping. That was more of what their interest was."

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