#VT – Jamie Smith Hopkins paints a vivid portrait of the quickly emerging online space where neighbors connect in tomorrow’s Baltimore Sun…
People looking for an online neighborhood forum used to have few free choices beyond discussion sites such as Yahoo groups or email lists. Now options are popping up left and right. Besides Nextdoor, which launched nationally last fall, there’s Home Elephant, My Virtual Neighbor, Neighborland, Yatown and Hey, Neighbor! to name a few. Some are available in just a handful of cities so far.
“There’s probably 20 startups in this space,” said Michael Wood-Lewis, chief executive and co-founder of another site, Front Porch Forum. His company launched eons ago, in Internet terms 2006…
Neighbors write in with questions, problems, ideas or needs “Urgently seeking lost dog,” for example and the company compiles everything into an emailed newsletter that comes out as often as there’s sufficient content.
In Burlington, Vt., 10,000 of the city’s 16,000 households have signed up. In Westford, Vt., residents used Front Porch Forum to start a food pantry. And in tiny Moretown, one of the Vermont communities hit hard by Tropical Storm Irene last August, neighbors reported that having had the e-newsletter for a year beforehand turned out to be a big help.
“During that year, book clubs were formed, dog-walking groups got together, the school’s PTA got stronger, more people were showing up for events,” Wood-Lewis said. “So when a disaster hit, it wasn’t a bunch of kind of vaguely familiar strangers who weren’t sure how to reach each other. They were living in a community.”
Atlanta-based Home Elephant, which launched last year, allows users in the same neighborhood to share news, chat and pass on alerts. People can sign in through Facebook and let the company suggest neighbors to “friend.” Nearly 6,200 neighborhoods in more than 70 countries including some areas in Maryland are using it.
Chandler Powell, a Home Elephant co-founder, said… he feels like the David to Nextdoor’s Goliath, because Nextdoor is a Silicon Valley startup with venture capital money. Home Elephant so named because elephants are social creatures has no marketing budget and is a nights-and-weekends labor of love at the moment, Powell said.
Nextdoor, with its Facebook-like feed for neighborhood conversations, has an immediately familiar look. It also has designated spots for recommendations, resources, photos and the like, along with a map showing where participants live. And users can receive neighborhood “urgent alerts” sent as text messages to their cellphones.
If there’s no Nextdoor site in your neighborhood, you can start one but only if you get nine other neighbors to sign up within three weeks. The company is trying to avoid ghost-town websites.
To join, you have to prove you live where you say you do providing your home telephone number for a verification call, for instance. Or a vetted neighbor can vouch for you, which is how Nextdoor said most people end up joining.
Of the approximately 2,000 Nextdoor neighborhood sites, 20 are in Maryland. Seven more are in the pilot stage locally, waiting for enough sign-ups.
From the Sunday New York Times yesterday, by Sherry Turkle, author of “Alone Together: Why We Expect More From Technology and Less From Each Other“…
We live in a technological universe in which we are always communicating. And yet we have sacrificed conversation for mere connection.
At home, families sit together, texting and reading e-mail. At work executives text during board meetings. We text (and shop and go on Facebook) during classes and when we’re on dates. My students tell me about an important new skill: it involves maintaining eye contact with someone while you text someone else; it’s hard, but it can be done.
Over the past 15 years, I’ve studied technologies of mobile connection and talked to hundreds of people of all ages and circumstances about their plugged-in lives. I’ve learned that the little devices most of us carry around are so powerful that they change not only what we do, but also who we are…
Which reminds me of a favorite quote…
Sow an act, and you reap a habit.
Sow a habit, and you reap a character.
Sow a character, and you reap a destiny.
– Charles Reade, 19th century writer
What acts and habits are we developing now with all this mobile technology? And does it add up to changes in our individual characters and destinies?
From a comment writer on the Times op-ed…
A few weeks ago, while having breakfast in a crowded restaurant, I was pleasantly surprised to note that a family of 4 across the room was saying Grace before starting their meal. Until my daughters pointed out that Dad, Mom, Sis and Junior were bowing their heads in front of their untouched meals because each one of them was furiously tapping the phones on their laps.
Unlike many online providers, Front Porch Forum does not want to keep its members transfixed to their screens for eight, 12 or 18 hours per day. Rather, we aim for five minutes of daily news and conversation from and with nearby neighbors. We aim to help people better connect with their actual neighbors and take up conversations… not online, but on the sidewalk, grocery check-out, and school playground.
From Turkle again…
When people are alone, even for a few moments, they fidget and reach for a device. Here connection works like a symptom, not a cure, and our constant, reflexive impulse to connect shapes a new way of being.
Think of it as “I share, therefore I am.” We use technology to define ourselves by sharing our thoughts and feelings as we’re having them. We used to think, “I have a feeling; I want to make a call.” Now our impulse is, “I want to have a feeling; I need to send a text.”
So, in order to feel more, and to feel more like ourselves, we connect. But in our rush to connect, we flee from solitude, our ability to be separate and gather ourselves. Lacking the capacity for solitude, we turn to other people but don’t experience them as they are. It is as though we use them, need them as spare parts to support our increasingly fragile selves.
We think constant connection will make us feel less lonely. The opposite is true. If we are unable to be alone, we are far more likely to be lonely. If we don’t teach our children to be alone, they will know only how to be lonely.
#BTV #VT – Calling digital leaders and Vermonters statewide! Help set the path for Internet technology use that will create jobs, enliven our communities, reinvent schools and increase citizen participation. Register today for…
Fascinating keynote speaker, Nicco Mele, will be joined by Governor Shumlin and dozens of other speakers. Sign up today!
Front Porch Forum is a proud e-Vermont partner and we look forward to participating in this event.
From TechCrunch today…
Internet adoption among U.S. adults increased rapidly from the mid-’90s to about 2005. Since then, though, the number of adult Internet users has remained almost stable at around 75 to 80%. The Pew Internet & American Life Project’s latest poll shows that this trend continued in 2011. Those who are online use the Internet more than ever before, but about one in five U.S. adults is simply not online.
According to this report, “senior citizens, those who prefer to take our interviews in Spanish rather than English, adults with less than a high school education, and those living in households earning less than $30,000 per year are the least likely adults to have Internet access.” Age, household income and education have remained the strongest positive predictors of Internet use since Pew started tracking these numbers…
Ross Douthat took on Google Glasses in yesterday’s New York Times…
The Man in the Google Glasses can find his way effortlessly through the mazes of Manhattan; he can photograph anything he sees; he can make an impulse purchase from any corner of the world.
But the video also captures the sense of isolation that coexists with our technological mastery. The Man in the Google Glasses lives alone, in a drab, impersonal apartment. He meets a friend for coffee, but the video cuts away from this live interaction, leaping ahead to the moment when he snaps a photo of some “cool” graffiti and shares it online. He has a significant other, but she’s far enough away that when sunset arrives, he climbs up on a roof and shares it with her via video, while she grins from a window at the bottom of his field of vision.
He is, in other words, a characteristic 21st-century American, more electronically networked but more personally isolated than ever before.
We may be a couple years away from implanting newborns with chips… Google Glasses will seem as quaint as a horse and buggy.
Check out Google’s video… and then take a look at some of the parodies.
Ghost of Midnight is an online journal about fostering community within neighborhoods, with a special focus on Front Porch Forum (FPF). My wife, Valerie, and I founded FPF in 2006... read more