Bulletin, from Google | Hacker News Reader

Bulletin, from Google

posts.google.com

So many services and organisations have gone after hyperlocal for the perception of the ad-revenue that's just waiting to fall into their hands - because if someone's reading about a car accident near their route home they need an advert for the local carwash right?

Similarly if they are reading about some music gig coming up in the area they need an ad or offer for 25% off burgers at hipster burger joint du-jour that covers that night.

I once worked on a hyperlocal project that was funded by a television company to actually curate a stream of interesting and novel content about the local area. These were trained journalists curating sourced and self-created content. If the content was good enough then there would be ad-revenue (and deal placement) to follow, or so you would think. Turns out nobody was interested at all.

I don't think user submitted content will be engaging enough, but we'll see. I think anyone with a disposable income that could be targeted for hyperlocal ads or deals doesn't have enough time to use this app as well as twitter/facebook/whatever.

Interestingly, NextDoor seems to be taking off in my area. The premise is that the neighborhood has a mailing list or bulletin board for neighbors, by neighbors. A bit of the feed contains events from community organizations like the nearby police station soliciting feedback or park service having an open house.

This might be a swing at services like that.

I made a comment below asking if this was basically supposed to be like Nextdoor. I do get the sense that this is the market they're going for.

It can work. There is a news portal related to my city. Its filled with local ads. The local news coverage is good enough to ignore ad infestation.

> Bulletin makes it effortless to put a spotlight on inspiring stories that aren’t being told...Effortless: No setup is required to create a story - all you need is a smartphone

Speaking as a former newspaper journalist, not much about local journalism is effortless. Even writing a glowing positive obit is a lot of stress -- make a mistake and you'd hear about it from the dead person's loved ones for awhile. A smartphone definitely helps with the mechanics of publication and dissemination but I don't think that's generally the bottleneck from the content-generator side. I'm interested in what mechanisms will be in place to filter -- i.e. a "PageRank" for contributors. But given how difficult a problem it has been to do this for YouTube, which is actually a cash cow for Google, how many engineering resources will be devoted to a news app?

"Open: Bulletin stories are public and easy to discover: on Google search, through social networks, or via links sent by email and messaging apps"

I'm not a fan of Google these days by any stretch of the imagination, but if they're sincere about making Bulletin content truly open and accessible via the web and not stuck in a proprietary mobile app silo, then this could be a good thing. The recent trend of large companies towards closing themselves off from the open web is troubling, so any new content platform that makes openness a priority is something to applaud.

Is there a crypto hat lets you bet on when Goog will pull the plug on this new service. I’d wager 1000 doge that this will stop taking new users in 18 months and be offline in 36.

This would all be nice ...

... if it wasn't for the hunger of Google for my personal information.

You mean just like your bank, your retail store, your ISP, your news outlet, your car dealership, your ...

Google is no different and isn't doing anything new that hasn't been done for decades; even hundreds of years.

I would have a problem with it if my bank, retail store, ISP, news outlet and car dealership were all the same company.

The scale and connectivity of the data is the problem here. It's now possible to draw conclusions from the combination of datasets.

Do not think that the scale and connectivity is different. All those businesses sell your information and extract your information, too. In many, possibly most, cases, they know more about you than Google does.

But in many countries that kind of sharing is not allowed without an "opt-in".

It doesn't seem different from how, say, WhatsApp is used in some places to spread "news".

The potential for abuse is big. What sort of curation will be done?

Right now, I can safely say that 90% of everything I get in popular WhatsApp groups is fraud, misinformation, fake news, baseless accusations, harmful medicine advice, etc.

Maybe Bulletin will be exclusively focused on events and they'll have a better time curating that.

If Bulletin shows hyperlocal "news" based on your actual location without the need to join anything, then there's already added value compared to WhatsApp et al.

As for moderation, could it be possible that they have an AI to weed out the stupid?

So, is this a Google version of Nextdoor? Or a mashup of Twitter and Nextdoor?

Previous discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16240345

Discontinued?

Probably.

Its card style doesn't follow Material design.

Oh look another Google project that will last for a while and then they'll pull the plug on it.

"we wanted to give something back to the community and have therefore decided to open source it" ;-)

Looks like something they can integrate into Google Maps, once it's successful enough. But because nobody will ever find it again there, it will be removed 3 Years later because of lacking usage.

Please don't post unsubstantive comments to HN. This one is unsubstantive because it has become almost a Betteridge-level cliché. Curiosity and predictability can't occupy the same space, and HN is a site for curiosity.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Looks like they are aiming at Instagram? Well. Good luck.

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