Talking Over the Fence: How One Social Network Brings Neighbors Together
Ryan Kuder knows something about building communities. At Yahoo!, he worked on some of the company’s largest brands including Yahoo Messenger and Yahoo Answers. Now, along with entrepreneur Jonathan Tarud, he is turning his attention to issues closer to home. Kuder made the announcement on his blog, http://www.ryankuder.com,
My co-founder, Jonathan Tarud, and I are starting a company called Neighborsville answering the question, “What’s going on in my neighborhood?” And when you want to know what’s going on in your neighborhood, who better to ask than your neighbors? We’re building a neighborhood based social network to do just that.
Our hypothesis is that by enabling neighbors to share information with each other, you’ll know more about what’s going on in your neighborhood…which makes your neighborhood a better place to live.
While there is a bit of an overlap with sites such as Yelp, which offers online reviews of local restaurants and services, Neighborsville is more complimentary to local reviews and directory sites rather than a direct competitor. What those sites don’t hit on is the more intimate conversations that happen between neighbors.
To get a feel of where Kuder is going with Neighborsville; look to where he has been. One year ago, Kuder built a small network with the idea of communicating with his neighbors in the town of Willow Glen, California. It quickly grew to over 400 members.
A quick visit to that site found conversations you might expect about restaurants, local events, meets and sport, but also more “between neighbors” talk that you’d never find on Yelp such as this exchange, (edited for brevity, user names removed),
Posted by Xxxxxxx — A neighbor was arrested earlier this month and the details involve the shooting of a gun or rifle in his home. Nicest guy however, we would like to know the details (we think it may involve another neighbor and both of their front doors are just steps away). It was a horrible scene to see our neighbor face down on the ground for well over 30 mins.
Reply by Zzzzzzz — Look here: http://www.crimereports.com/map
In the past 14 days, a Rape at Bramhall park was reported as the only crime on Willow. I hope you are not referring to the house on Crescent and Willow. That guy is a registered child molester.Reply by Xxxxxx —Thank you for the link. The case you’ve brought up is not the same as my post however, do appreciate the info. Especially, since that local is right around the corner and yikes, that’s really creepy news!
Now that’s the kind of valuable information you’d get from your best friend, or the fellow next door, but certainly not from Yelp or the Yellow Pages or any other online site -perhaps until now.
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This entry was posted on Friday, August 22nd, 2008 at 7:00 am and is filed under News, Social Networks. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
