And 25% of the households in East Montpelier are on board their FPF already, just three months after launch.  And they’re putting it to great use.  Here’s a note posted by Barbara today…

Hurrah for Front Porch Forum and the generous people of East Montpelier! Saturday we asked for a wheelchair and intercom and today we have both!  We had four offers of wheelchairs and two offers of intercoms.  Thank you all.

If you’d like to bring FPF to your town in Vermont, please enter your information on our home page, or contact Michael Wood-Lewis.  (Here’s a map and list of our current coverage area.)

#VT -

• Town of Hyde Park
• Village of Hyde Park
• Hyde Park Community Community Circle
• Polow, Polow & Mahoney
• Carolyn Smiles

Front Porch Forum is now available in more than 70 Vermont towns (and one each in New York and New Hampshire!).  Please send folks to FPF to sign up!

Patrick Kitano at Streetfight.com comments on that news, along with Nextdoor, Outside.in, Topix, and Facebook today… an interesting piece.

Indeed, the “neighbor conversation” online space is heating up tremendously, with at least a couple dozen start-ups and digital media giants trying to crack the code of neighborhood-level traction.

Three out of five Burlington, VT households connect with their neighbors through our offering, FrontPorchForum.com.  Amazingly, in 2011 HALF of them posted.

Most of us want to be more  connected to the people and place around where we live… this is a huge opportunity.

Will they get traction?  Will they generate significant revenue?  To the first point, many efforts in this space seem a mile wide and an inch deep with broad reach and little traction.  To the second… in Nextdoor’s case, they’re not trying yet.

This is in stark contrast to Front Porch Forum which has incredible particpation, albeit in a single region.  Half of Vermont’s largest city participates in FPF.  And they aren’t just lurkers.  Whereas much of social media content is provided by a slim 1-10% of users, on FPF a majority of our members speak up… and the tone is consistently neighborly.  Also, we’re seeing great results with our recently launched neighborhood-specific advertising system for local businesses.

Front Porch Forum has given me information, income, and, best of all, the first real feeling of connection to this town after living here for 22 years!

- Anne Howland, Middlesex, VT, FPF member

Commentary about the Nextdoor launch…

• New York Times
• All Things D
• Gigaom
• Screenwerk

This is further evidence of the “neighbor connect” online space heating up.  In the past year, I’m aware of at least two dozen significant start-ups focused on facilitating conversation among people who live near each other.  Some, like Localocracy, aim at niches (local ballot issues and related), while others intend to promote a general sense of community.

Huffington Post/AOL joins MSNBC.com, which acquired EveryBlock.com last year, in this space, as well as many other new VC-backed and boot-strapped entrants. Most start-ups in this area appear to be strong on tech and weak on traction.  That is, they can crank out the code, but few people actually show up and use their product.  To make matters worse, many attempt to open up everywhere all at once.  As a friend said… “a mile wide and an inch deep.”

Front Porch Forum is an established leader in this space, with amazing traction in our state.  More than half of our primary city participates.  In another FPF town, 75% of members post… much higher than the 1-10% seen on many social sites.  And the member success stories flow through FPF faster than we can write them down.  People use FPF to reduce crime, find jobs, give away baby gear, reunite with lost pets, recommend roofers, debate ballot measures, call city hall on the carpet, and much more.

With our new web application recently launched, we look forward to bringing Front Porch Forum to communities far and wide.

http://frontporchforum.com/supporting-members

Every year, members like you help fuel FPF so that we can continue to help neighbors connect and build community.  More than 30,000 local households have joined and shared hundreds of thousands of postings with their neighbors through FPF!

Whether it’s flood recovery efforts, group yard sales, car break-ins, sharing perennials, election debates, block parties, town notices, or other topics, our small band of committed staff work day and night to keep this all going.

If you enjoy and value Front Porch Forum, please become a supporting member today at:

http://frontporchforum.com/supporting-members

Your contribution is critical to keeping FPF going strong — and will be enormously appreciated. We look forward to serving you and your neighbors in the coming year.

Your FPF team,
Michael, Nina, Linda, Jamie, Lynn, Gisele, Jeff, Regina, Suzie, and Jan

P.S.  We also accept checks, payable to…
Front Porch Forum
PO Box 64781
Burlington, VT 05406-4781
802-540-0069

FPF is not a charity and contributions are not tax deductible.  Ad sales to local businesses cover part of our expenses, and your supporting-member contributions help close the gap.

What I want to answer with this post (long though it may be) is:

• Why did Web 2.0 emerge and are there any lessons to be gained about the future? [cheap accessible digital hardware]
• Why did Twitter emerge despite Facebook’s dominance? [asymmetry, real-time, curated RSS / link-sharing]
• Why did MySpace lose to Facebook & what can Twitter learn from this? [encouraging an open platform where 3rd parties can make lots of money]
• Does Facebook have a permanent dominance of the future given their 500m users? [chuckle. ask microsoft, aol/time warner & google]
• What are the big trends that will drive the next phase of social networks? [mobile, locations, layering of services, data management, portability & more]

An excellent piece… worth the whole read.  Shortened version here… and full version here.

Small start-ups simply post to their nearby neighbors letting folks know that they are open for business.  Other companies purchase advertising.  Nonprofits often ask their supporters to post event announcements, each on his/her own FPF neighborhood forum.  Local institutions and municipalities are buying subscriptions that provide access to their area neighborhood forums.

And, of course, neighbor-to-neighborhood recommendations flow through FPF at a rapid rate… plumbers, roofers, mechanics, dentists, arborists, snow plow kings, and on and on.  People like to ask their neighbors and FPF helps that to happen easily and with lots and lots of nearby neighbors all at once.

FPF staff are available to speak with business groups about all this.  Indeed, we addressed the Burlington Referral Organization this morning.  Tomorrow we’ll be at the CEDO Winter Business Fair.  We’ve enjoyed sharing our message with several Chamber of Commerce groups, Rotary, VBSR, business school classes, leadership institutes, and more.

Here’s a note about the Feb. 11 business fair in Burlington.

From its founder…

EveryBlock has been acquired by MSNBC.com

From the Local Onliner…

While the site takes a unique approach, it is poised to compete with other hyperlocal sites such as Outside.in, Topix.net, Placeblogger and Patch.com (acquired by AOL this summer for $10 million).

From TechCrunch…

EveryBlock currently covers only about 15 cities in the U.S. and comScore estimates its U.S. audience to be only 143,000 unique visitors a month (July, 2009). In contrast, competitor Outside.in attracts 800,000 unique visitors in the U.S. These are relatively small numbers, but these services do a good job of collecting neighborhood news without the expense of actually reporting it.

From Kara Swisher…

MSNBC.com–a joint venture of Microsoft (MSFT) and GE (GE) unit NBC Universal–paid several million dollars for the “hyper-local” information site, which is up and running in 15 cities, including New York, San Francisco, Seattle, Chicago and Boston, sources said.

In June, Time Warner (TWX) online unit AOL paid about $10 million to buy Patch Media.

The New York-based start-up is a platform that does deeply localized coverage of communities on a range of topics, from announcements to news to events to obituaries. It is aimed at competing with local newspapers and other media.

EveryBlock takes a slightly different approach, scouring a mass of publicly available data in a variety of U.S. cities from a variety of public records–such as crime stats, building permits and restaurant inspections–and reassembling them into more comprehensible and geographically relevant news feeds, depending on what a user asks for.

And we’ve been asking the same question as Gotham Gazette…

… anyone familiar with the Knight News Challenge knows about Knight’s open source requirement: projects developed with Knight funding must be released under an open source license — it is one of the terms of funding. EveryBlock released their source code a few months ago, but Biella Coleman posed an excellent question

“Since the code is under a GPL3, doesn’t MSNBC.com have to also keep it under the same license if modified? Or can they take the code base since Everyblock is a web-based service?”

… And, James Vasile at Hacker Visions has an answer. It is a complex answer, and worth a read. Loosely? The holder of the copyright is not necessarily bound by the license a project was released under.