Here’s the rundown of what the new Yourville is all about:

Yourville brings you and your neighbors together to share and discover reviews of the pros and cons of your experiences with local businesses, as well as meet new people in your area, and gain insight into other important information in, and around, your region. Think of Yourville as a Yelp for those of you that live in, or travel to awesome locations outside of your home country. We’re currently available in Costa Rica only, but expect us to launch new countries in the first half of 2010.

Who’s using Yourville, you ask?

• You might be an Expat working or going to school in Costa Rica.
• Or, you just decided to pull up stakes and move to an exotic destination and immerse yourself into the local culture.
• You could even be a traveler going on a backpacking trip throughout Latin America.

Either way, Yourville is for you. You can now get trusted recommendations and share your experiences of local businesses and service in Costa Rica (more countries launching soon).

Go to http://www.yourville.com to check us out for yourself. If you don’t live in Cost Rica, that’s ok. You can still add reviews for businesses that you experienced when you last visited, or look for recommendations for a great Hotel or Bar on your up coming visit. If you live in Costa Rica, then you know how important it is to get trusted recommendations for businesses. Whatever your status is, we hope you discover how useful and fun Yourville is.

We would like to thank Vesess for all of their help with this project. We couldn’t have made it this far without them. Additionally, we would like to thank all of our current members and beta testers for all of their patience and dedication.

If you have any questions, please email me  cmullins (at) yourville (dot) com or use our contact form.

First of all, this project has, from the beginning, really been about building a product that will enable people to communicate more effectively and doing so by using the tools that are available via open source, rentacoder.com or by my limited programming knowledge. I’ve been building websites since 1994, but do not consider myself a programmer. I know enough to be dangerous and to make a real programmer shake their head in dismay. Never-the-less, I feel that in today’s Web space, we can build an online company using the open source tools that are currently available and not have to be a software engineer to do so. If we can launch a product that has enough appeal to our target audience, and it gains a small amount of mind share, we will have an opportunity to learn from our users; what tools and features do they want. Then, we can start down the path of custom development based on what our users want. Why should we build something we think “they” want, when we don’t really know. In an Ideal world I would like for our target audience to tell us what they want. So, that’s what we’re going to attempt to do.

Building a website/ company that will have the features and appeal that will nourish a Web community is no easy task. Especially if you don’t have a computer science degree and a Social Anthropology PHD (Danah Boyd. Well, I guess neither of those degrees actually make it easier but, I suppose they help somehow. As for making a successful community- based website, in my experience, the success actually is a result of the users and a lot of luck. Of course the right tools help, as well. I’m very grateful for open source tools such as Word Press, PHPList, Drupal, FireFox, Thunderbird, MYSQL and PHP. I was a co-founder of an e-commerce company that launched in 1999 and was built entirely on Microsoft products. We used GreatPlains and Onyx on the backend and spent a vast load of cash to build a site that was no better than what I could do today with open source software. That reminds me – anyone have any info on Apache’s Open for Business Project

Over the next couple of weeks we’ll be sharing just about every move we make in regard to creating an awesome website and company. We’re only a few weeks away from a public launch, so stay tuned and sign up to be notified when we do.