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I-Neighbors, Not just another social network
neoatbay writes "Globeandmail has a story on I-Neighbors.org, a social networking site based on geography, rather than affinity. Unlike other websites that allow global, national, or city-wide communication, I-Neighbors links members of a single neighborhood, defined by the people that create them. It is created by a team led by Pro. Keith Hampton at MIT. Anyone in this neighborhood, and play badminton?"
I think that's the point... people tend to have friends they know from work or school, we don't know the people we live around. This gives geeks a chance to meet people around them to, for instance, play badminton. I'm not going to look for anyone, but I can certainly understand why others would want to.
By the way, there aren't many neighborhoods registered right now. I just checked out 4 or 5 zip codes and none of them had any...
This has potential. One thing I've noticed (and read about) over the last twenty years (the explosion of the information age) is the accelerated pace of everything. I had lived in neighborhoods where within 200 feet of me are ten households and potentially contacts and friends. But everyone is SO busy working, commuting, carting children around, being paranoid.... noone has time left for socializing. So, after living in that house for almost ten years, the only people we really became acquainted with were our next door neighbors.
Ironically, right before moving from there, we discovered potential new friends one block away. How? She was the bailiff of a trial for which I participated on the jury. In a trial 30 miles from the house!
I've already created a new neighborhood for my new place. Will be inviting people around the area. I think this could be disruptive technology, which in this case could be very cool. My $.02
Who cares why you would or would not want to do it... many people will.
The real jewel of this project is that it has an easy ad revenue pathway. The service knows exactly where people live so it can target local businesses to them... easy money!
Finally one of these social sites has the ability to make real money.
If they were to partner up with something like local google, they could have a real market.
We should reward good business ideas... we see them so infrequently on the web these days.
How is this more than a zip-code structured Orkut community system? Besides pre-defining the communities before any participants arrive, it's really not.
How CAN you improve on the orkut-style social networking system?
1. Dont be so DAMN slow. Friendster, orkut, etc are all so slow at this point it's almost worthless. They all start off fast but load kills them.
2. Create an easy 'port' system whereby you can just 'point' the new site at an existing profile to have the new profile auto-created and friends added automatically. Filling out 4 page profiles and spamming your friends multiple times a year = no fun.
As other posters pointed out, there are few neighborhoods registered so far. One of the reasons this is so is that i-neighbors has, in my opinion, a ridiculous policy for what a neighborhood is: "An area of fewer than 500 households, or a single apartment complex." If they get even 5% participation across the US, an incredible feat by website standards, they would have on the average, less than 25 households in a neighborhood. That's a pretty minimal selection of people. I don't see what the point of making neighborhoods so small is; I can easily get to at least 10,000 households by foot in my average, suburban town. If this think wants any chance of survival, they better change that rule.
Probably. It seems a little weird to walk up to someone's house these days and say "hi, I'm so and so, can I come in?" In the old days community centers like churches and the market were used for that sort of thing. Maybe something like that is done at malls where geeks walk into gaming stores and chat it up about what they are buying. Or people in clothing stores, or something similar. Seems these days when you strike up a conversation like that you might be thinking inside "is this guy asking me about that so he can come to my house and steal my Xbox and all my games?" or "I hope I never run into you again!" =)
"Beware of he who would deny you access to information, for in his heart, he dreams himself your master."