Ghost of Midnight

Neighborhood Mail Lists Thriving

Steve Hendrix wrote in The Washington Post today about the widespread use of neighborhood email lists in and around Washington, DC. Read here for lots of interesting examples. (Thanks to E-Democracy.org for the tip.) Also noted…

According to the Pew Center‘s Internet and American Life Project, 55 percent of Internet users subscribed to e-mail group lists in 2006 as a way of maintaining ties with the community or hobby groups they belonged to, up from 32 percent in 2001.

Yahoo, which provides free hosting services in exchange for implanting small ads at the bottom of each message, says it handles more than 8 million groups with more than 100 million members.

So there’s a huge demand for neighborhood email lists and a huge number of people are not yet served. Further, the leading provider in the sector now, Yahoo Groups, is decidedly user-unfriendly and not accessible to lots of people with low computer skills (based on personal experience trying to guide many folks onto and around various Yahoo Groups that I’ve been involved with).

This adds up to great potential for Front Porch Forum.