[LINK] Walled ICT Gardens

[stephen at melbpc.org.au]

Speaking of walled ICT gardens, metinks some will do well.

Local-neighborhood based social networks .. 

Meet Your Neighbors, if Only Online  By R STROSS nytimes.com May 12 2012


I DON’T know many of my neighbors. I blame genetics: I’m hard-wired for 
shyness. Or so I thought until I signed up with Nextdoor.com, a 
neighborhood-based social network. There I have discovered a comfortable 
place for even a borderline recluse like myself. 

“As you get older, the community that is most valuable to you is the one 
in which you live,” says Nirav Tolia, chief executive of Nextdoor, which 
is based in San Francisco. “The neighborhood is where you buy a home, 
where your kids go to school, where you spend the majority of your 
physical life.” 

Nextdoor’s site provides a house-by-house map of neighbors who are 
members — although members can choose not to have their names attached to 
their addresses — as well as a forum for posting items of general 
interest; classified listings for buying, selling or giving away things; 
and a database for neighbor-recommended local services. 

The company, which introduced its service last October, says it has set 
up more than 2,000 such neighborhoods in the United States, each 
containing about 500 to 750 households. These mostly follow boundaries 
defined by Maponics, a supplier of geographic data. 

Nextdoor’s interior pages are private, unlike those of some other 
neighborhood-themed Web sites In a Nextdoor neighborhood, everything, 
including the directory of members, is visible only to fellow members, so 
marketers can’t vacuum up names and addresses. Nor does the information 
appear on search engine results. 

To keep out interlopers, Nextdoor requires new members to prove that they 
actually live at their claimed residences, either by allowing a one-cent 
transaction to be processed on a credit card tied to the address, by 
having an existing neighborhood member vouch for their identity, or by 
other means. 

Once their addresses are verified, they can look at the map to see who 
else has joined. Currently, 20 percent of households in my neighborhood 
in a San Francisco suburb are Nextdoor members. 

Members don’t need to visit the Web site to stay abreast of postings. 

They can opt to receive posts by e-mail — immediately or in daily 
digests — or to get a text message in the case of urgent alerts. 

THE service is free and, for now at least, carries no advertising. 

On its frequently-asked-questions page, the company says it plans to 
enlist local businesses to give members special offers that are 
unavailable elsewhere. This, the company says, will help “generate 
support for local businesses, in turn strengthening their own 
neighborhoods.” 

In the meantime, the company relies on capital raised from investors that 
include Benchmark Capital and Shasta Ventures. 

“At Facebook,” Mr. Tolia says, “it can feel out of place to see 
advertisements alongside pictures of your vacation or the announcement of 
your marriage.” At Nextdoor, he says, ads for local plumbers and 
electricians will be a natural fit because users are looking for 
recommendations anyway. 

When Mr. Tolia flips the switch to add advertising, however, he may find 
that Nextdoor’s members view ads as an intrusion there, too. On the 
online forum in my own Nextdoor neighborhood, there was a kerfuffle last 
week after one member asked for recommendations for a good gardener. Some 
members responded cheerfully, but then, seemingly out of the blue, 
someone offered a testimonial for a local insurance agent. That caused 
several members to express dismay over what appeared to be advertising. 

“I think we should not allow advertising notices” to be posted at all, 
one member said, and others vowed to leave the site if ads were permitted 
to sneak in. This little outburst shows how residents are protective of 
neighborhood space, whether physical or virtual. 

Neighborhood identity has not been destroyed by the Internet. Robert J. 
Sampson, a sociology professor at Harvard, says: “There’s a common 
misreading that technology inevitably leads to the decline of the local 
community. I don’t believe that. Technology can be harnessed to 
facilitate local interactions.” 

Professor Sampson is careful not to overstate the closeness of neighbors’ 
relationships with one another. These are not the ties of close 
friendship, nor are they anonymous. They form a network of acquaintances, 
which he defines as people who share a working trust even though they are 
not good friends. 

In his new book, “Great American City: Chicago and the Enduring 
Neighborhood Effect,” Professor Sampson argues that worries about the 
supposed loss of community in cities are nothing new. In 1938, for 
example, the sociologist Louis Wirth described “anonymous” 
and “superficial” social relations as essential elements of urbanism. But 
Professor Sampson says that this ignores the way that a city was, and 
remains, ordered by distinctive neighborhoods — what he calls “the 
enduring significance of place.” 

BACK in its very early days, Facebook was an exclusive social network 
built around a neighborhood of sorts: the Harvard campus. Residency was 
verified by the university-issued e-mail address. 

But when Facebook expanded beyond campuses, it left the atomic unit of 
the neighborhood behind. This has created the opportunity for a start-up 
like Nextdoor to come along and create something that Facebook no longer 
is: an online network defined by real-life proximity. 

Randall Stross is an author based in Silicon Valley and a professor of 
business at San Jose State University. E-mail: stross at nytimes.com.

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Cheers,
Stephen