Colorado has at least two startups vying for the eyeballs of you and your neighbor. I’ve covered eNeighbors (Longmont) once previously, and now Nayburz (Denver) wants to be the heavy on your block.
While the models are not exactly the same, both products aim to help you make friends with your neighbors. eNeighbors employs more of a “closed network” approach where the customer is really the community itself which in turn invites residents to join the network. In contrast, Nayburz takes the approach of defining a community (such as Denver) and then allowing users to meet each other across a connected web of neighborhoods.
So, the eNeighbors approach is to sell a community a tool that they can use to attract residents, improve the community, etc, like this:
eNeighbors started as a site offering customized communities for neighborhoods, and has recently released “version 2.0” which according to founder Chris Stock is more like a “Facebook for Neighborhoods” that is more template driven. eNeighbors now has about a dozen such communities as customers so far.
In contrast, Nayburz uses the concept of your “bubble” (area) that you belong to. You decide – this can be specific (such as a building) or generalized (such as downtown Denver). It looks more like this:
Nayburz has yet to launch, but plans to on August 1 and will focus specifically on Denver initially. Founder Paul Davis told me that the plan is to expand to other communities such as “Chicago, Minneapolis, Portland and Phoenix” in the next phase.
While the ideas behind these sites are certainly not new, there does seem to be a bit of a resurgence of social sites aiming to connect neighbors. Personally, I prefer the simple data-driven approach of sites like Fatdoor (assuming it would work in Boulder). Maybe that’s because I don’t really want to write on my neighbors metaphoric wall so much as find out who they are and what they’re all about, so I can decide who to bump in to next time I walk the dog.
From the user perspective, I think the place for sites like these might really exist inside of Facebook these days, where everyone is already hanging out – assuming they want to meet somebody new at all. Of course, there’s the Facebook problem staring you in the, um, face.
What ever happened to bribing your neighbors with cookies and getting off your ass, anyway?
Cookies and getting off my ass is a little more appealing to me than using a neighborhood online community. We know the neighborhood gossip and when we want to get the skinny on the neighborhood, we just strike-up a conversation with her. Of course, we feed her some bullshit just for fun (as Im sure everyone does). But, its actually enjoyable, even for an introvert, to get some face time on occasion.
I do think there is a market for a good neighborhood community subscription service. Specifically, a subscription service targeted at homeowners associations (probably already exists). The service could offer web sites to homeowners associations to provide information about the neighborhood as well as a place to send complaints and other stuff (i.e. a standard set of services). Kind of a homeowners association blog + Comacate sort of thing.
Our homeowners association has a web site, but its crappy and has to be maintained (its not data driven). I bet theyd go for a subscription service in a heartbeat.
@David Duey
eNeighbors is a subscription service for HOAs like you describe. If you would like eNeighbors in your HOA, you can send the information to your board by using our online form at http://www.eneighbors.com/contact/tellafriend.html
I also wanted to mention that eNeighbors hopes to help communities grow by fostering face-to-face or offline communication. For example, we’ve increased social event participation in some of our neighborhoods by 300% through on online event registration.
Here are some stats if you’re interested: http://eneighbors.wordpress.com/2007/06/14/eneighbors-stats-515-613/
I agree with you that neighborhood discussion will be easier to foster in places like Facebook where people are already hanging out. We have just released a “neighborhood” app for Facebook. In my opinion most sites, like eNeighborhoods have a problem – they simply don’t know what, where or even the names of the actual neighborhoods. Our facebook app leverages over 140,000 Real Estate agents knowledge to build this hierarchy with proper naming conventions. Here it is if anyone is interested.
http://www.facebook.com/apps/application.php?api_key=ee7db06f898c1a1e669d4a0627689fa4