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Meeting Locals over the Internet?
tjjuggle asks: "Why is so hard to do local communication on the internet? Suppose I want to find a group of random people to play soccer with tomorrow. Given that I live in a town of 50,000+ people, many of whom are online, there should be a way. For major metropolitan regions, Craigslist.org fills this gap, but it is no use to those of us who live outside of the San Francisco Bay Area. Has anyone developed a service like Craigslist which can be used throughout the country? I imagine a site that, given a zipcode, it could then tell you which users are signed up who live within 10-20miles of you. Does anyone know of other local communication mechanisms?" Even now, one of the best ways for local communications remains Instant Messaging, but you usually have to meet the person, first. Are there other community-oriented websites out there that can assist users in meeting other users who live nearby?
Great idea, but think of the ways it can be abused. What if some creep or stalker wants a list of all the people that live around him? That could easily be arranged. Or if a spammer wanted e-mail addresses or physical addresses, they could easily sign up for multiple accounts.
I would have signed up for such a service, but after an atempted identity theft, I would probably think long and hard before participating in such a thing.
And I think such services would be hard to create on a national level given potential legal issues involved. A honeypot of litigation! (people suck like that.)
I find open office helps me with these tasks. print poster, put poster in local common area, wait for phone calls / emails. even works for those with out computers.
In the San Francisco Bay Area, a website received newspaper coverage, but its idea is applicable anywhere.
s iness/columnists/david_plotnikoff/2759439.htm
http://www.local2me.com/
Here's the newspaper article:
http://www.siliconvalley.com/mld/siliconvalley/bu
The website has a simple idea: one huge email list, filtered by location. People register their location (by ZIP code), and other optional information about themselves, when signing up. All email submissions go into a central database, then they are reflected only to those people who have chosen to receive them. It can also be filtered by age range and other categories, and multiple filters can be applied.
For instance, I have chosen to receive emails from everybody 10 or fewer miles away from me, and emails from people in my age range 20 or fewer miles away.
On the service, people swap recommendations all the time. The mailing list has helped me find a good veterinarian in the area!
Because of the publicity generated by the media coverage, this service is most popular in the San Francisco Bay Area, but it does have support for nationwide ZIP codes.
It could be better: I wish it had a browseable archive of postings that could be similarly filtered, instead of it being a simple email forwarder. That would make it easy to browse past answers to FAQ's. But, it is very good for what it does offer.
Dr. Demento On The 'Net!
Personally, I'm a big fan of IRC. There are several IRC search engines out there. Make use of one, type in the name of the largest city near you and *presto* people from the local area galore. In fact, that's how I met my wife.
--Michael from Local2Me