Maps are important to neighborhood level online social networking. From an announcement received today…
Placebase, Inc., the makers of the Pushpin online mapping platform, today announced a partnership with Urban Mapping Inc. (UMI), the leading provider of enhanced of local interactive content. As part of this agreement, Urban Mapping’s neighborhood boundary database will be available on the Pushpin platform. A demonstration site is available at: http://www.pushpin.com/urbanmapping…
This is similar to what the good folks at Maponics provide I believe.
Also, from Google Maps today… people can now drag address markers for businesses and houses to a more precise location. So Google is asking its millions of users to do the honing in that it can’t currently do through brute force. Seems like a good move.
I wonder how many addresses we have in the United States? We have about 300 million people and 2.5 or so people/household… so about 120 million households (some of those in multi-unit buildings) plus businesses, institutions, etc. I wonder what percentage of these millions of buildings could have their location refined via Google’s registered users?
And a wish… that the Google Maps API used better data… or, perish the thought, that is used the same data as Google Maps.
Marchex is working on a new network of neighborhood blogs called MyZip. If I read the description correctly, they posit that the $50/month paid to a blogger in their network will provide sufficient incentive to keep up a five-post/week pace indefinitely… that’s about $2.30/posting. Hmm… could be interesting.
I would neither blog about or read regularly someone’s daily blog about my neighborhood… and the $2.30/post payment somehow makes it even less likely. What I want… to hear from and interact constructively with lots of my neighbors. That’s our aim with Front Porch Forum.
Time will tell. Lots of room for new ideas. Marchex doesn’t have the MyZip site up yet.
TechCruch reports today that FatDoor.com just landed $5.5M of funding and a new CEO from Yahoo…
Fatdoor aims to connect you with your neighbors by providing a localized social network for your physical community. Although the site will be in private beta until the spring of 2008, a handful of details have been publicly available since at least June. The website will integrate with Microsoft Virtual Earth to display local business and residential listings on an interactive map. Once users claim their listings, they can add profiles and put down their interests. Users can then plan events and form local interest groups with the site.Fatdoor will also pull in information from other web services such as business reviews from Yelp, events listings, and driving directions. Users will be able to add their own business reviews but they won’t be displayed outside of the network on Yelp’s website. Fatdoor’s homepage will display something akin to the Facebook news feed with information about upcoming events and recently created groups.
So my FatDoor scorecard reads… great space with huge potential, new CEO with impressive credentials, money to burn… this could prove interesting. Or not… time will tell.
Most Silicon Valley successes are made by roping in some small percentage of the population over a huge geographical expanse… e.g., 5% of the United States on board some website would be 15 million people… yipee.
But to succeed at the local or neighborhood level, you need a relatively large percent of the population in a small area (e.g., our Front Porch Forum has 25% of our pilot city registered, but Burlington, VT only contains a fraction of 1% of the U.S. population). This is a very different game and one that most mainstream dot.coms and start-ups aren’t pursuing well or at all… thus the opportunity.
Mike Lanza and some friends have created something called Playborhood.com…
As parents of toddlers and babies, we’re concerned about whether we can provide a better life for our children than we had. We’ve certainly done well financially – better than our parents, by and large – so we can provide an abundance of material goods for our children. However, we weren’t hurting at all for material goods when we were kids, but we find that kids of today are sorely lacking in what was the greatest joy of our childhoods: free, unstructured play.
Free, unstructured play (or what we refer to as simply “play”) has virtually vanished from the lives of most children in America. We are committed to doing whatever we can to bring it back for our children and yours.
At Playborhood.com we will to build a community of parents in the United States, if not the world, that will become more aware of this problem, discuss solutions, and implement the best of those solutions.
This issue also motivates me in part to pursue Front Porch Forum. I commented on Mike’s piece here.
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