TechCruch covered the launch of a new startup called Fwix. Fwix is the project of a couple of former Facebookers. It provides a city-by-city feed of from content various social media, including Twitter, Flickr, Craigslist, Yelp, and others. Right now they only cover NY, Chicago, Boston & LA.

On the other hand, just a few days before, Everyblock.com announced that they’d added 3 new cities to their hyper-local news site, including Seattle. Everyblock pulls in some data from the same sorts of websites as fwix, but they go a lot further. Besides covering twice as money cities, they let you filter things down the the level of a couple of blocks. More interestingly, they’ve gone to the trouble to unearth siloed local government data for things like restaurant inspections, police reports, 911 calls, construction permits and more.

I hear ya, it’s not exactly the sort of thing you worry much about when you are 22, but the point is, they are doing some heavy lifting, rather than plucking low-hanging fruit. Oh, did I mention, Everyblock is releasing its source code in 2009 after their funding, a grant from the Knight Foundation, runs out.