Read this first on The Local Onliner, BackFence, one of the more visible hyperlocal sites has bit the dust.

BackFence almost feels like the old grandpa of the entire hyperlocal market – there are now half a dozen other sites all trying to crack hyperlocal (including a few of our customers of iBegin Source). I find this remarkable that even with all the hyperlocal sites dying, they keep coming up.

Mind you – I am a big believer of hyperlocal. Our first foray into local was hyperlocal – we built a local community website for the little block we lived in. My fiancee walked around and took pictures of every place in the neighborhood, manually entering it into the database.

The uptake was amazing. Within two months the site was doing roughly 200-300 unique visitors a day. For a two block area, and with minimal promotion, it was quite an eye opener – it let us know that people are (in large quantities) attempting to find and connect locally.

Alas the site no longer remains. It was on one of our older servers, which suffered a catastrophic failure. The entire site was lost.