Ghost of Midnight

… about neighbors, community and Front Porch Forum

Street-Level Local Online

Posted on Thursday, March 29, 2007 by No comments yet

There’s a new player in local online… at the street level. It’s called StreetAdvisor. Users log on by street address and then rate their street. There’s some social networking elements too. The company plans to advertise locally to get people to start supplying data.

My two cents: As with most local online efforts that depend on user input, the need for lots of active users seems to outweigh the degree of nifty-ness of the bells and whistles. This is a nifty site without users… so time will tell. It takes a different angle than anything else I’ve seen out there… which I value.

Front Porch Forum is all about getting users on board and engaged with each other first. We have more bells and whistles on the drawing board, but it’s the personal connection with neighbors and concern about neighborhood that drive our service. More than 4,000 households in our one test area signed on in our first six months… 15% of Burlington, Vermont… with zero marketing. People love it so much that they’re going door-to-door to recruit neighbors.

TechCrunch, WebWare and Mashable have blog entries about StreetAdvisor. Thanks to David Wilcox for encouraging me to take a second look at it.

Posted in: Community Building, Front Porch Forum, Local Online, Social Media


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