Neighbourly by Google
neighbourly.google.com
neighbourly.google.com
It seems unfair that there is only room for so many famous people, so many inventors, so many journalists, because all of the attention (money) aggregates towards the top.
If you could have, say, a local Martha Stewart that actually can subsist and become quite wealthy by sticking to a couple counties in a State, the whole system becomes much more valuable to each individual who participates.
The way it is now your value is almost nonexistent, there is such a high barrier of entry to virality, it's like winning the lottery. What if it was easier to go viral in your own home town, build a career off of it, and never have to make the front page of any national website?
Sorry, bit of a rant, but services like this hint that other people are thinking similarly. I'd like to see a much bigger push into fragmenting the web, and moreso fragmenting the attention share. It moves much like the economy, trickle up.
I do recommend people participate in their local subreddit though because it's one of the few examples of this that I see working out there.
In what way would it be better than existing town- and neighborhood-specific groups on Facebook or something like /r/LosAngeles?
There are many things that make subreddits and local facebook groups not work, though, and that's a lack of value to the user. They are there for you to use, or not, and their value comes from participation only.
Facebook isn't going to add a feature for your community. Reddit isn't going to help moderate your subreddit. These large companies make money off of the national-level mindset, so their local offerings are kind of "take it or leave it."
I was very wary of it, but now feel ok recommending it with that provision. Tread lightly ;)
I was skeptical at first, but it turned out to be more than I expected.
In some ways, it's a downside: turns out I'd rather not know what kind of opinions my neighbors have on issues like housing projects and public transportation, and have PSA with security camera pictures in the feed whenever a suspicious (read: minority) person walked past someone's home.
On the other hand, perhaps it's for the better not to live in a bubble.
Then, I found this Twitter account that just shares all of the hilarious things they see on Nextdoor and it is pretty funny: https://twitter.com/bestofnextdoor
I wouldn’t even mind if they asked me every couple of months or so to verify my location.
I could have easily tricked Nextdoor into doing whatever I wanted to. But shouldn’t have to waste my time.
So my friend who lives in a neghborhood of condos that the snobs in million dollar homes intentionally left out can't get the alerts from his own municipality.
I’d say Chummy (https://chummyapp.com) is the social network of local reciprocal help Neighbourly is heading to become. The major differences between the most popular social networks in the US, though, got illustrated there: https://chummyapp.com/why-chummy/
In lieu of re-creating existing social media. Which tends to scale down quite nicely. I'd focus on a single neighborhood "vertical" that boosts partcipation. Say a lending library of physical books. Used baby furniture and children's toys. Or even laptop recycling drives for schools. Distribution is as easy as printing flyers and putting them in mailboxes!
Good luck ;)
Here's what the map view looks like: https://peertal.com/#/map-view
Here's the video pitch: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tkyH3JRxndc
Android App https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.peertal.io...
iTunes App https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/peertal/id1238992138?mt=8
Disclaimer, I'm the founder so feel free to ask me any questions or give us feedback. We're still learning the ropes..
The fantastic thing about the Internet is that it reduced those silly restrictions, like geography. There are still neighborhoods, but they're based on something more significant than where you happen to live.
And I don't agree that you have to be front page of any national website. Did you ever see Gibi in one? Probably not, yet she has almost 1M people following her and makes a living out of it. She's a celebrity in her town - it's just that the town is called "ASMR" rather than "Boston" or "Philadelphia".
That doesn't mean the current model doesn't have flaws, but I don't think returning to the past will solve any of them.
It also doesn't mean geography isn't important in some cases; I would certainly support good local reporting, for example. But only when it makes sense for the purpose, not as a sort of informal trade barrier. The Martha Stewart of my home town? No thanks.
Maps, business reviews and advertising...only makes sense.
And they probably will, but that's why the EU's antitrust cases against Google are so important!
Also, a good part of Nextdoor's growth is due to real-world hands-on activity. Things like actual people being rewarded for handing actual neighbors flyers. Nextdoor will even send its members postcards to get their neighbors on board. Again -- physical objects.
Google doesn't do physical. If a problem can't be done remotely through machine learning, it's not worth doing.
https://www.buzzfeed.com/carolineodonovan/racial-profiling-i...
Regardless, Nextdoor in my area is hardly toxic. It's actually pretty stale -- mostly a mix of home services referrals and junk for sale. They've cranked up the ad content very significantly over the last year without really bringing/encouraging much in the way of better neighborhood content. I don't know if Google is going to do it any better, but some competition in this space certainly couldn't hurt.
Anyone building platforms needs to take that problem seriously since it leads to both serious real-world negatives (e.g. antivax) and driving more reasonable people away.
A couple of weeks ago there was a thread condemning jogging with your dog. The OP was pretty upset about someone jogging with their dog during the heat of the day. There’s plenty of validity to the concern that someone could overheat their dog, but the crazy just exploded from the woodwork. A flame war erupted and several of the commenters stopped just shy of calling for dog joggers to be stoned.
Nextdoor seems to bring out a special brand of crazy.
As another poster pointed out in a way the fact that racism is obvious in these platforms is an improvement over it hiding in plain sight.
For good or bad everyone is now fixated instead on the local homeless encampment after the mayor and ACLU created a situation where those folks can't be dislocated. It's less "how do we help those days unfortunate souls so they aren't in this situation" and more "how did we get rid of these stinky campers bringing down my property value?"
The only form of trading name protection is a trademark. So if neighbourly.co.nz wanted to expand into new markets, their next move would be a WIPO filing for their trademark - but you can't just register a trademark in a country and not trade under it there, it's easily challenged.
And after having searched IPONZ's website, it appears that there's not even a registered trademark in NZ for neighbourly - so if Google were to start trading in NZ using "neighbourly", neighbourly.co.nz would have to rely on the passing off provisions of the Fair Trading Act and be able to produce evidence that Google had caused them loss by confusing their customers.
TL;DR - trademarks are important.
As an aside, based on spelling (-our vs. -or) I presume this Google product comes from a non-American market.
I really wish they would just become a Platform company and let the next doors of the world build on them and let goog take 30% of revenue.
They are bad at network/human stuff. As evidenced by this site “coming soon.”
Depending on how that goes one or the other will be removed within a year.
Nextdoor is a hive of NIMBYism.
I question these content-generation-as-process apps, and whether users are exhausted of them. One of the reasons I believe NextDoor works so well is that it doesn't try to be the neighborhood reference guide. This is opposed to starting with the premise of answer-a-question, as this service seems to drive. I'm also speaking from the standpoint of my little neighborhood in Seattle, so as with everything -- your mileage may vary.
Just an observation: reading through the mission posted on the site, this seems to be geared toward cities in India? The footer allows for language change and lists "UK English", "India English", and other non-English languages. I wonder if this service intends to support other countries when they release.
Is this a feature that's coming out globally or just in India?
[0] -https://techcrunch.com/2018/05/30/google-launches-neighbourl...
A hack that has been used in the past to scale totalitarian social control is to employ what is essentially a viral enforcement mechanism: basically, getting people to inform on their neighbors. It only takes one or two visible instances of this behavior with a violent outcome and it replicates quickly, following an exponential growth rate until the population is saturated with informants.
Reporting on neighbors and peers is much of the glue which has held together the worst authoritarian regimes: DPRK, East Germany, Nazi Germany ... as well as being a primary strategy for causing the revolutions which put those regimes in place.
A platform like this:
- lowers the friction of informing
- is vulnerable to anonymity / spoofing / automation / remote manipulation
- allows for stories of informing to persist in the community memory as always-online posts, increasing their effect across time
- is connected to a de facto surveillance apparatus (the internet) to boot
It's an article of clothing worn by Indian women.
I look forward to the next 'bear in the neighborhood' scare hosted by Google ;)
NextDoor and email lists are a terrible way of disseminating scares. I'd rather have a "apex predator weather" feature that tells me, day-by-day, whether to keep the dogs in.
Unfortunately / fortunately in my area ... there was no bear (at least no evidence) and it was HIGHLY unlikely to have occurred (bears haven't been around these parts for decades).
But there was a siting, and lots of photos of bear (deer) poo, and trampled flower beds as evidence!
1. Try out new business
2. Take over the market due to Google’s name/search power
3. Decide business isn’t worth it and pull out
4. No one is left, people have to start from scratch again
Though, there's a correlation/causation question there. Google Reader shutdown to entrench Google's attempt at a walled garden social network, but Google was considered late to the "walling in your garden" party at the time, so market forces (Facebook, Twitter) what they were at the time, it's possible that even if Reader didn't shutdown, RSS probably was "doomed".
Similarly, Google Talk? For a brief period everyone was using XMPP (whether they knew it or not), to the point where even Facebook capitulated to using XMPP for real-time communications, partly to integrate with Google Talk, just in time for Google to drop most Talk support and XMPP support in the "upgrade" to Hangouts.
Again, things are washy in the correlation/causation question. If Google had pushed Talk longer, would XMPP be more of a thing today? Or was the walled garden communications network too tempting to the market that it would have gone that way anyway?
Personally, I think Google losing a lot of its "roots" in trying to use standards to best fit (RSS, XMPP), versus rolling everything internally/proprietarily was a key change in the web at the time, and I'm willing to ascribe it more to the causation side of things, but there's certainly a healthy debate to both sides.
This comment gave me an idea: what does Trends say for RSS?
It has two results:
- For the search term: https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=all&q=rss
- For the "computer file format": https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=all&q=%2Fm%2F0...
Both charts are nearly identical.
There's a noticeable blip in March 2013 when the closure was announced, but that blip sits within a concretely downward trend.
I had to dig a bit to locate the very tiny downward slope in July when Reader actually shut down; there's nothing noticeable there.
Flu trends
Latitude
But in Goog’s case it’s not so much innovating and failing as it’s poor product design and sticktoitiveness with +, Wave, a hundred chat apps
Google Reader was 5 years ago... what other example is there of a successful or even well-liked product that was killed, and not simply renamed or migrated? Picasa albums made it to Google Photos, for example. Google Talk became Hangouts. Where exactly does this meme come from? What product are you mourning that you actually used? Buzz? Wave?
But more importantly, they just don't seem to actually have a strategy. Every few months we hear this is the future, and then that thing is never mentioned again. Or they announce a clone of some existing successful service and then don't seem to have any follow-through willpower.
All these renames/migrations/rebrands usually come with breakage of the UI/API/functionality. It's irritating to actual users and feels sloppy to everyone who pays attention.
However Google earned this reputation and however fair it is or isn't, it undoubtedly hurts new product launches. So the question is, how does Google throw off the reputation of being completely untrustworthy?
Kune: https://kune.ourproject.org/about/
(ex-Novell) Vibe: https://www.microfocus.com/products/vibe/features/
SwellRT: http://swellrt.org/
1.answered in the place description that questioners clicked right past
2. not suited to crowd sourcing, such as things that require a rep from the business to approve ("Can I get a children's cot put into room 643?")
And there's the Amazon Q&A issue with answers too: so many responses with "no, I don't know how to answer that", because people don't think enough to realise that not answering is a more appropriate response when you don't know on sites like that!
Ad money is dominated by spray-and-pray big name brand awareness whose correspondence to conversions is opaque, but most of online adtech is about tracking metrics for particular targeted ads, and big buyers are frustrated about their opaqueness and questioning their value [1]. Then there's the long tail of everyone else, from a small band to a local restaurant, who are just trying to get their names out there, but lack the clout to lobby Facebook's ad policies.
This hyperlocal advertising is what many Facebook ads have been tending towards. It's only natural that Google would try to corner as much of it as it can, with services that are more content-driven than Maps.
I think the challenge is that the question base is so broad and most local experience revolves around things to see and do, which is largely a solved problem between Yelp, StubHub, Google Maps and Google Search.
Also, I've found that if people don't want to use the massive number of local reviews already on those sites, they tend to ask their actual friends. Why ask a single random person a question when dozens or hundreds have already posted a review about a local experience?
Nabo is an Australian system, but lacks the features of nextdoor - notably the ability to have subgroups specifically for apartment blocks.
There's a few other systems out there, but they're usually non free, or rubbish, or both.
I'm actually surprised that they aren't pulling back a bit. Antitrust case is not near in this climate, but it will happen eventually and it's becoming harder with their ever growing tentacles to avoid or reverse. They are going to be their own worst enemy in the end.
The big one was yesterday ordering 62k cars for the Waymo ride sharing service.
In that time I’ve noticed Real Estate, Ads, Marketplaces, Interest groups, completely redesigned apps, etc. and probably a bunch of stuff that I haven’t noticed as well.
1. Doesn't sound like proper english
2. Is this targeted towards indians or something? Everything I am seeing seems to indicate that. Such as " ayurvedic chemist " and "salwar"
The neighborhood mentioned in the screen shots, "Andheri East" is in Mumbai. Mumbai's lingua franca is Hindi, and Marathi is the state language of Maharashtra which Mumbai is the capital of, so it seems likely that they're starting the rollout in Mumbai, given that these are two of the language choices.
It looks to me that Google applies some kind of personalization to my landing page.
(I am very curious about your account, btw. This is your 2nd comment ever, after the first in 2009.)