I’ve long believed that neighborhoods represent a key ingredient in how local search and media evolves. Back around 1995, Brad Inman held a brainstorming retreat for online real estate people at his redwood forest home. I still remember Brad’s passion about the importance of neighborhoods in the fabric of online real estate - and community in general; as a former real estate newspaper writer Brad used to love doing neighborhood profiles. While the concept has stuck with me, the content gap made it an impractical pipe dream.
no boundaries
Creating the geographic boundaries that define neighborhoods is a complex content development task, but over the last 5 years, the gap has been reasonably filled for US neighborhoods. A couple of companies (notably Urban Mapping) and Zillow both recently opened up free access to their proprietary boundary files. You’re beginning to see the structure seeping into platform mapping companies, search services and even US-based YP publishers. And, of course in real estate, the sector in which this content is mission critical. While the developer momentum seems pretty nascent, never underestimate the power of an API.
Problem is, this content is US centric, which challenges those of us who try to focus on global application opportunities.
minimal importance in consumer search
Yep, you read it right. I do not think that consumers intuitively think in terms of neighborhoods as a logical area qualifier for search. While the concept is solid, searching in your neighborhood is just not a part of our natural search vocabulary. While searching from your home address is very relevant, searching only within your neighborhood is less intuitive. Perhaps this will evolve.
As a building block of personalization, it gets more interesting. Selecting the neighborhoods you frequent has long intrigued me in local search personalization. Visualizing and browsing search results by neighborhood can also be a compelling visual navigation concept. So, while I’m not a huge fan of neighborhoods as a search phrase, I do believe in it as a building block “behind the search experience”.
strong affinity for discovery and community
I really believe in the power of neighborhoods as a logical organizing and gathering structure for consumers. As such, I see the value of neighborhoods being much more punctuated in social local than in core search.
Consumers are continually signaling their desire to reconnect, to simplify, and to balance their lives. The appeal of neighborhoods feels like a fundamental part of this macro trend. People want to be less isolated, and the trends you see in urban development point to a desire for more real world local identity and connections.
When you overlay this motivation with the Web 2.0 world, the evolution of neighborhood gathering places becomes a very important thing to figure out. Where do social networks and neighborhoods connect? How can consumers form new patterns of neighborhood interaction? My hunch is that the power of social networks can be harnessed in very interesting ways.
friends vs. neighbors
The vast majority of the focus on social media centers on networks of friends. While this is big idea stuff, I find myself stretching to find broad applicability in local business advertising. While my friends are “technically ideal” to advise me in my purchase activities, the majority of my friends come from a geographical context that makes their advice irrelevant (in most service-based businesses, for sure).
While very interesting, I think friend-based networking concepts (for local) will take some time to materialize and scale. Neighbor-based concepts offer more local search leverage with scalable near-term potential.
the social - neighborhood gap
It’s been fascinating to see how little local structure has been designed inside the major social networks. All good to me, since this spells opportunity! The concept of local in Facebook is secondary, and - so far - its pretty rudimentary. Facebook was constructed around networks of friends not location. However, when you attain the kind of critical mass you have in Facebook or MySpace, there are large concentrations of people in the same neighborhoods.
There are start-ups who have chosen the aggressive mission of creating new websites and web services built on the neighborhood concept. Glad to see it. My current curiosity is centered on the evolution of neighborhoods inside the critical mass social networks, rather than another brand new thing fighting for consumer attention.
closing the loop
The context of this post was, in part, to help explain the thinking behind an important development partnership that we just announced at Local Matters. We’ve taken over the ownership and development of the Facebook Neighborhoods application, which was developed by Point2 Technologies (a leading real estate technology company) to syndicate local home listings to FB users.
It’s a great partnership that allows us to expand and stretch this new space in local media. We share the belief that by improving the consumer value of Facebook Neighborhoods, the opportunity for real estate listings naturally expands. Makes sense. What’s also exciting, is that this neighborhood engine provides a foundation for international neighborhoods, which is central to the way we think of the business.
More details will follow. In the near term, we’ll be spending our time listening to the users who have downloaded the Facebook app (there are >800K of them). I’ll try to fill you all in as we learn and grow from this.
I’d be curious as to how a neighborhood is constructed affects the tool usage. An urban neighborhood with mixed business/residential has a different make up from a suburban neighborhood (with blocks of residential with strip mall breaks). I always had the theory that the break seems to come from if you need to get in a car or not to get a drink. I was looking at this site … http://www.walkscore.com/ … which shows how “walkable” your location is to businesses and other destinations.
It would seem that the Facebook app is going to gear toward the “walkable” neighborhoods where events are actually occurring (as opposed to “pizza at the pool” in a suburb). I would expect that I would sign up for a neighborhood other than my own to find out about those events and businesses in those neighborhoods. Even then, I find myself more loyal to businesses (and the people who run them) than an actual location. Suburbs might end up being limited to schools, community pools and smaller churches.
Taking my car, another mile or so isn’t going to make a difference as to where I shop or eat where that difference is significant if I’m on foot. A shared location (a pub, a park, a street of restaurants surrounded by residential) seems to create community loyalty.
I’m surprised more developers don’t push business/residential communities more. Those neighborhoods always seem to be a premium despite the size of the actual housing. Yet developers doggedly keep building suburban enclaves.
I’d be curious to hear a report on how your app works differently in different types of neighborhoods. I’d venture to guess that you’ll see more “walkable” neighborhoods participating in the app and neighborhoods being more like “categories” than actual gathering destinations or events.
Left by R Haussmann on June 27th, 2008