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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'm not sure if its exactly what you are looking for, but there are -tons- of topics, and I live in a relativly small city, and there are a few local meetups in the area of differant interests. It's a pretty cool service, and looks like it could grow into something quite cool.