Keith Hampton, Assistant Professor of Technology, Urban and Community Sociology at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology has recently launched I-Neighbors, “a new website to increase social contact and participation at the neighborhood level”.
For the past two years I have been testing this site on three Boston area neighborhoods as part of my E-neighbors study. Some of the trial neighborhoods had very positive results – a significant increase in the number of local social ties, more frequent communication on and offline, and higher levels of community involvement. The I-Neighbors website is an attempt to extend these results to other neighborhoods in the U.S. and Canada.
… Members have access to services that include a neighborhood email list, a local directory, a shared photo album, a neighborhood messaging system, a tool to poll their neighbors’ opinions, and a service that connects neighbors who work near each other for carpools. Unlike other web sites that allow global, national, or city-wide communication, I-Neighbors links members of a single neighborhood, defined by the people that create them.
I-Neighbors is only for Americans and Canadians at the moment, so I appropriated a residential zip code so that I could take a look (you can’t join without one). My first thought is that the I-Neighbors has a lot of potential, but is currently rather sparsely populated so it’s a bit like being first at a party, hanging around and waiting for people to turn up. Without enough users, all you have is empty site architecture – photo pages with no photos on, calendars with no events, carpools with no cars
One concern is that although I-Neighbors promises to keep your email address secret, it is quite happy to share your phone number and street address with anyone who looks at your profile. I am not someone who believes that every second person on the net is an axe-murderer, but there are people out there who would heave a brick through your window if you had a row with them, so a little caution goes a long way. Failing to give users the option to hide such personal details seems na�ve to me, and it’s strange that I-Neighbors hasn’t considered it
Personal security is something that UpMyStreet, a UK local information site which is borders on the geosocial networking space, took very seriously. Although you can find out roughly where any user is, the locations are not precise enough to allow anyone to find a specific street address because the data has been deliberately muddied.
In terms of geosocial networking potential, I-Neighbors and UpMyStreet take rather different approaches. I-Neighbors was designed to be good at fostering social connections, strengthening weak links and providing a useful online hub for organising offline activities, but only within specific zip code-related communities.
UpMyStreet looks at geography more flexibly, so provides a way for people who are physically close to each other to talk about local issues, but without limiting them to communities linked to a given postal code. In fact, even the definition of ‘close’ is flexible – in densely populated areas, users can be within a few hundred yards of each other, but in the countryside it can be 10-15 miles, spanning several post codes.
It’s not clear how I-Neighbors will deal with overlapping communities – at the moment it looks as if there will be simple duplication, which is not good for fostering togetherness. Unfortunately, this silo model results in empty communities, something you just don’t get that on UpMyStreet because even if the nearest conversation is 50 miles away, it will still show up as your nearest conversation
On the other hand, in I-Neighbors one can more easily create an online social presence, and their social networking tools are slightly stronger. You can create a profile, find people who are like you, who need to share a car, who are running events you might be interested in. UpMyStreet’s geosocial networking potential is lower because the forums are the only way to connect with people. That’s ok insofar as it goes, but it’s not making the best of the social tools now at our disposal.
Where UpMyStreet shines, and I-Neighbor lacks, is in the provision of relevant local information. UpMyStreet utilises a number of sources, from governmental to commercial, which are scraped together onto the site so that you can find out a whole bunch of stuff about local schools, crime stats, weather forecasts, public transport, etc., in your local area. The same sort of data exists for the US, so it would be interesting to see I-Neighbors do something similar to provide basic community information for each zip code instead of relying on user-entered data
The ideal geosocial networking site would take the flexi-geographical and informatics aspects of UpMyStreet with the stronger social side of I-Neighbors and create a way for people to come to know all about their local area, both geographically and socially. It would also have to integrate much more closely with offline life, forming relationships with local community magazines and newspapers, schools, businesses, local authorities etc., in order to create a site that was not just an online representation of offline life, but a useful, meaningful extension of it.
(Via Apophenia.)
