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Communications The Internet

I-Neighbors, Not just another social network 235

Posted by timothy from the of-course-you-could-just-walk-outside dept.
neoatbay writes "Globeandmail has a story on I-Neighbors.org, a social networking site based on geography, rather than affinity. Unlike other websites that allow global, national, or city-wide communication, I-Neighbors links members of a single neighborhood, defined by the people that create them. It is created by a team led by Pro. Keith Hampton at MIT. Anyone in this neighborhood, and play badminton?"
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I-Neighbors, Not just another social network More

I-Neighbors, Not just another social network

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  • Stooooopid (Score:5, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward on Thursday September 02, 2004 @07:52PM (#10145040)
    This is a stupid idea. I lived in the same neighborhood my first 20 years of life and only knew one neighbor - barely. Then the rest of my life since then, I've lived in the same apartment complex and I've never known anyone. I have seen the people who live next door and downstairs once or twice in the last five years, but I don't know anything about them. Or maybe they don't even live there and they're just visiting the people who do.

    Anyway, the point is - I don't know (nor do I want to) the people that live six inches away from me on the other side of the wall. Why the FUCK would I want to know any other people in the "neighborhood"?

    This sounds like just an excuse for local people to hookup and fuck behind their significant others' back.

    • Re:Stooooopid (Score:3, Funny)

      by Anonymous Coward
      Not to mention, prefacing everything with an "I" is so 1998. God damn. That alone is reason enough to AVOID that gay ass site.

    • Re:Stooooopid (Score:5, Insightful)

      by FlipmodePlaya ( 719010 ) on Thursday September 02, 2004 @07:54PM (#10145056) Journal
      I think that's the point... people tend to have friends they know from work or school, we don't know the people we live around. This gives geeks a chance to meet people around them to, for instance, play badminton. I'm not going to look for anyone, but I can certainly understand why others would want to.

      By the way, there aren't many neighborhoods registered right now. I just checked out 4 or 5 zip codes and none of them had any...

      • Re:Stooooopid (Score:3, Insightful)

        by tobes ( 302057 )
        I always thought meeting people was the easy part, and that maintaining a relationship was the hard part. If you don't have the skills to meet new people continuing social interaction with people you do manage to meet should prove difficult at best.

        • I always thought meeting people was the easy part, and that maintaining a relationship was the hard part. If you don't have the skills to meet new people continuing social interaction with people you do manage to meet should prove difficult at best.

          You're wrong, based on my own personality type at least. I'm great with people I know, but I often make a terrible first impression. The reason is quite simple: I actually care about people I get to know, so a complete stranger capturing my attention is les

      • Re:Stooooopid (Score:3, Insightful)

        by stephanruby ( 542433 )
        By the way, there aren't many neighborhoods registered right now. I just checked out 4 or 5 zip codes and none of them had any...

        Well, don't hold your breath. The domain name was only registered less than a year ago and there are probably thousands of identical competitors already. Personally, I'll just stick to Craigslist and Yahoo, at least they have critical mass.

      • Re:Stooooopid (Score:3, Funny)

        by barzok ( 26681 )
        From the sounds I've heard through the walls in my various apartments, I don't want to know the people I've lived around.
        • Exactly.

          Most people don't want to know their neighbors. I've had one neighbor that was interesting, in all the places I've lived. Generally, the people I end up living by, I don't want to have anything to do with.

          It's better to have friends that aren't next door. It's a lot easier to avoid them, when you realize that they're psychopathic freaks. Or in their demented minds, they think you are. :)

          It's really worth driving a few miles to visit friends, rather than having the uncomfortable mom
        • Yeah, my neighbors are always having some sort of loud ecumenical debate, and agreeing with each-other a lot.

      • Re:Stooooopid (Score:2, Informative)

        by CrkHead ( 27176 )
        By the way, there aren't many neighborhoods registered right now. I just checked out 4 or 5 zip codes and none of them had any...

        I'd say there are a fair number of listings for a site that has been up one week.
        http://i-neighbors.org/usa.php?rank=state [i-neighbors.org]


      • I tried every neighborhood I've lived in, in the last few years. Nothing. I did try 10011, and found two. :)

        I made one, for shits and giggles, but knowing my neighbors (the little bit that I do), none of them would read Slashdot, and probably wouldn't run across that site.

    • Re:Stooooopid (Score:5, Funny)

      by xkenny13 ( 309849 ) on Thursday September 02, 2004 @07:57PM (#10145071) Homepage
      This is a stupid idea. I lived in the same neighborhood my first 20 years of life and only knew one neighbor - barely.

      Maybe you'd know more people if you left the house every once in a while. Give the service a chance, maybe they can help you.
      • He knew his parents, that he was obviously living with at the time.

    • Re:Stooooopid (Score:5, Insightful)

      by BoldAC ( 735721 ) on Thursday September 02, 2004 @08:01PM (#10145097)
      Who cares why you would or would not want to do it... many people will.

      The real jewel of this project is that it has an easy ad revenue pathway. The service knows exactly where people live so it can target local businesses to them... easy money!

      Finally one of these social sites has the ability to make real money.

      If they were to partner up with something like local google [google.com], they could have a real market.

      We should reward good business ideas... we see them so infrequently on the web these days.

      • " Who cares why you would or would not want to do it... many people will."

        Oh, I'm _sure_ many people will. (I'll get to that later.) And many people will get disappointed, just like with all the other services.

        Here's some free clue: friendship is more than two people knowing each other. For example at least having any common topic to discuss is pretty much a requirement.

        That's why stuff like IRC or message boards work (somewhat): they come sorted by topics, not by irrelevant idiocies like ZIP codes or "w
    • This sounds like just an excuse for local people to hookup and fuck behind their significant others' back.

      HEY!!! Thats a billion dollar idea!!!

    • Re:Stooooopid (Score:3, Insightful)

      by fm6 ( 162816 )
      It's something you wouldn't use, therefore it's stupid? I'll say it again: we need a new mod: "-1: the universe doesn't revolve around you".

    • Re:Stooooopid (Score:2, Insightful)

      by cot ( 87677 )
      This may be a foreign concept to you, but there's something to be said for a sense of community. Knowing your neighbors, inviting them to a barbecue, being able to ask them to keep an eye on your place while you're out of town, etc.

    • There is a BIG problem with the way your little world is so different from that of your ancestors (and that applies to me, for that matter).

      Now, that we Americans have been atomized, our community has been hollowed out, and now where do the ideas that get into our heads come from? From the Teevee, my friend (of course, I speak here of MOST Americans, not us Net Geeks, who spend so much time online; and of course a lot of people talk on the phone to friends). But in any event, so many Americans gets their i
    • > Anyway, the point is - I don't know (nor do I want to) the people that live six inches away from me on the other side of the wall. Why the FUCK would I want to know any other people in the "neighborhood"?

      Hell, I've seen the people six inches away from me on the other side of the wall. Now I know why their bathroom fan is on 24 hours a day, for 3 days a week. I want to move the fuck away from them, not get to know them better.

      Be thankful you don't know yours. The only community I want to join i

    • What!? This is a WAY better idea for us shy nerds that aren't good at approaching people.

      Plus, if your ever running from the cops, it's nice to have somewhere close bye!
    • you're so charasmatic. It's such a surprise only one of your neighbors wants to talk to you.

    • Re:Stooooopid (Score:2, Insightful)

      by Buckler ( 732071 )
      "This is a stupid idea. I lived in the same neighborhood my first 20 years of life and only knew one neighbor - barely. Then the rest of my life since then, I've lived in the same apartment complex and I've never known anyone. I have seen the people who live next door and downstairs once or twice in the last five years, but I don't know anything about them. Or maybe they don't even live there and they're just visiting the people who do." Indeed. I was in the same situation until about three weeks ago. Unf

  • this is an opportunity.... try it. (Score:5, Insightful)

    by yagu ( 721525 ) <yayaguNO@SPAMgmail.com> on Thursday September 02, 2004 @07:55PM (#10145059) Journal

    This has potential. One thing I've noticed (and read about) over the last twenty years (the explosion of the information age) is the accelerated pace of everything. I had lived in neighborhoods where within 200 feet of me are ten households and potentially contacts and friends. But everyone is SO busy working, commuting, carting children around, being paranoid.... noone has time left for socializing. So, after living in that house for almost ten years, the only people we really became acquainted with were our next door neighbors.

    Ironically, right before moving from there, we discovered potential new friends one block away. How? She was the bailiff of a trial for which I participated on the jury. In a trial 30 miles from the house!

    I've already created a new neighborhood for my new place. Will be inviting people around the area. I think this could be disruptive technology, which in this case could be very cool. My $.02

    • Seriously.... We moved to a new city 7 years ago and we new a few people who moved here from our hometown and university. But most weekends we just rented movies and stayed at home cause we didn't really know anyone.

      That is, until our daugther started school last september.. she would be invited to birthday parties or play dates and one of us would stay, hit it off with her friend's parents. It would steamroll from there. There hasn't been a weekend in ages that we have stayed home alone.

  • weird (Score:3, Insightful)

    by l33t m4st3r ( 672779 ) on Thursday September 02, 2004 @07:55PM (#10145063) Homepage
    Seems like a weird idea. why would you want to meet "neighbors" id rather go on irc and talk to random people that to go to a "picnic" with my "neighbors".

  • great (Score:5, Funny)

    by terrymaster69 ( 792830 ) on Thursday September 02, 2004 @07:56PM (#10145064)
    So instead of actually going OUT and meeting people in your neighborhood, you can all get together and chat online. Just what the world needs, more isolationism. (he says posting on slashdot)

    I can see it now, instead of the "Welcome to the Neighborhood!" cake, you get a "Welcome to the Neighborhood" email.

    • Actually, it's... (Score:4, Funny)

      by commodoresloat ( 172735 ) on Thursday September 02, 2004 @08:10PM (#10145150)
      "I, for one, welcome our new neighborhood overlords!"

  • What's the point? (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Anonymous Coward on Thursday September 02, 2004 @07:56PM (#10145065)
    If I wanted to interact with people that were geographically near me, I'd just hit the community center/park/mall. Sounds like just another way for people to stay shut up in their homes.

  • Member defined Neighbourhoods? (Score:5, Interesting)

    by aussie_a ( 778472 ) on Thursday September 02, 2004 @07:59PM (#10145087) Journal
    How defined are the neighbourhoods? For instance in America you could probably have city-wide hoods and it have a decent member size. But in Australia lots of cities aren't going to have any members but 1 or 2 people. What do they do? Can they have a state-wide hood? If not it isn't going to be popular in places such as Perth (one of Australia's 8 largest cities).

    Can hoods be redefined? For instance you might have a state-wide hood, but then as it becomes popular in that state you might want to break it down into smaller hoods? Is that sort of flexibility allowed? If not I can't see this being popular.

    This idea relies upon it having lots of people to get lots of people. But that's the problem, how do you get lots of people in the first place? By making it so large hoods can be created that can later be broken down into smaller hoods. Otherwise I don't see this being popular at all.

    • Re:Member defined Neighbourhoods? (Score:5, Interesting)

      by xkenny13 ( 309849 ) on Thursday September 02, 2004 @08:05PM (#10145130) Homepage
      How defined are the neighbourhoods? For instance in America you could probably have city-wide hoods and it have a decent member size. But in Australia lots of cities aren't going to have any members but 1 or 2 people. What do they do? Can they have a state-wide hood?

      Like phone book, mapping and even dating websites, I imagine you could limit your search to a distance radius from where you are located.

      This idea relies upon it having lots of people to get lots of people. But that's the problem, how do you get lots of people in the first place?

      Oh yeah? I've a question about this chicken and this egg...

      Simple answer: If you build it, they will come.

      By making it so large hoods can be created that can later be broken down into smaller hoods. Otherwise I don't see this being popular at all.

      At a minimum, you are entering a zip code (this is a US Postal code). Anyone living in my zip code isn't going to be all that far away.
      • Like phone book, mapping and even dating websites, I imagine you could limit your search to a distance radius from where you are located.

        And when you go and register, you will find that your imagination offers much, much more than reality in this case :)

        Oh yeah? I've a question about this chicken and this egg... Simple answer: If you build it, they will come.

        I built it (01760) -- when will they come? There's nobody even close as far as I can tell.
    • This idea relies upon it having lots of people to get lots of people. But that's the problem, how do you get lots of people in the first place? By making it so large hoods can be created that can later be broken down into smaller hoods. Otherwise I don't see this being popular at all.


      It appears slashdot is helping with that, there is aready a large list of communities created on Sept 2.
    • Theres a better idea, dynamic-sized hoods, just like newsgroups.

      You start with entire countries, for example everyone in Latvia. As the population grows beyond 100 members, you split it into provinces, then cities, then boroughs etc.

      So People from Mongolia and Afghanistan would have enough members to talk to, while LA and California would be heavily divided where one room would consist of everyone in a certain building.
    • I was wondering about the problem of neighborhood size myself.

      The "New Neighborhood Guidelines" list the following suggestions for any new neighborhood creation:
      • A real, geographic neighborhood.
      • Smaller than a city or town. Even a well-known name for a section of a city may be too large.
      • An area of fewer than 500 households, or a single apartment complex.

      The problem for me is that on most other sites that attempt to create a social network, be it Friendster, Livejournal, whatever, I've seen at most

    • I live in a City. In my zip there are 3 distinct areas, each had a neigborhood defined. Around the park, at this triangle etc..
      Of course living in cambridge MA, those regions were already in the computer.

      How the system reacts to sparsly populated suburbs remains to be seen.

      For each zip you can have multiple areas. I'm not sure if they divide.

  • Communities on Orkut? (Score:5, Insightful)

    by jgaynor ( 205453 ) <jon.gaynor@org> on Thursday September 02, 2004 @08:01PM (#10145101) Homepage

    How is this more than a zip-code structured Orkut [orkut.com] community system? Besides pre-defining the communities before any participants arrive, it's really not.

    How CAN you improve on the orkut-style social networking system?

    1. Dont be so DAMN slow. Friendster, orkut, etc are all so slow at this point it's almost worthless. They all start off fast but load kills them.

    2. Create an easy 'port' system whereby you can just 'point' the new site at an existing profile to have the new profile auto-created and friends added automatically. Filling out 4 page profiles and spamming your friends multiple times a year = no fun.
    • How is this more than a zip-code structured Orkut [orkut.com] community system?

      Oh! Oh! I know!

      Because his one isn't an exclusive gated community.

      Simple enough.
      • Because [t]his one isn't an exclusive gated community.
        Well, it is exclusively for US citizens and Canadians. In contrast to Orkut, where everyone can join. Yes, you have to get an invitation, but this was mainly to stir interest and at the same time not let hundreds of thousands of people overrun the site at the same time. It is very easy to get invited, as every user can invite arbitrarily many other people. This is very different from GMail, where every user can invite only one other user.

        Would any f
        • This is very different from GMail, where every user can invite only one other user.

          That's not what my account says...

          Maybe at the BEGINNING, yes. If you use them up, you get more, and larger chunks.

          I was last issued 6 at one shot.

    • Re:Communities on Orkut? (Score:5, Interesting)

      by randyest ( 589159 ) on Thursday September 02, 2004 @08:30PM (#10145257) Homepage
      It's not more than a zip-code structured Orkut community system. Or at least not much more. Maybe less in some ways.

      I tried it. I even registered my "neighborhood" since none existed in my zip code (or presumably near, since none were offerered.)

      It's faster than orkut/friendster/etc. but no faster than these services were when they started (i.e, before they got slammed with more load than they anticipated or were prepared to pay for.) We'll see how snappy those pages are in a few months.

      The UI is pretty good and intuitive, but there are some annoyances. For example, when I registered I filled out some 12 fields of info including user name and submitted. Of course, my username was already in use, but rather than present the otherwise-ok-filled-in form and let me change the username, or offer similar alternatives, it made me go "back" in my browser and re-enter everything into the emptied fields. That happened twice (I saved the info the 2nd time in anticipation, but it's still unnecessarily unfriendly.)

      Now that I'm in I seem to have control over a bit more than the competition websites offer. I have a profile where I can "share info about [my]self", a directory of users (me), an event calendar (nothing happening), photo albums (all empty,) matches (others in my community, of which there are currently 0,) reviews (nada,) polls (I plan to create a poll to surrender my neighbors' land to me, vote alone, and win, bwahaha), see who's online now (and thus not initiate my plan to claim their land for my own, since they're probably home,) email everyone in my neighborhood in one fell swoop (local spammer heaven!) or arrange/join a carpool.

      All of which sounds really neat, if not entirely original and a bit milquetoast (hey -- no "C.A." a la craigslist [craigslist.org]?) Or at least it would be if there were anyone else registered in the area.

      Which brings me to my final question -- how much do these ads cost?
      • LiveJournal has turned out to be a really interesting online community, and it appears to have scaled up quite well too. A neighbourhood would be easy to add as an "interest".

        Geocoding data is easy, searching on geocoding is also easy. Getting that integreated into tools that have been set up to do text is a bit more difficult. How do you let people freely define geometries, yet still have some way of searching and retrieving via text? C-Squares sounds cool, as it seems to give enough detail for most purpo

      • The UI is pretty good and intuitive, but there are some annoyances. For example, when I registered I filled out some 12 fields of info including user name and submitted. Of course, my username was already in use, but rather than present the otherwise-ok-filled-in form and let me change the username, or offer similar alternatives, it made me go "back" in my browser and re-enter everything into the emptied fields. That happened twice (I saved the info the 2nd time in anticipation, but it's still unnecessaril

    • 1. There's basically nothing to do on Orkut.
      Still, with its invite-only system, it keeps out tons of people who otherwise might want to try it.

      2. THe message boards are completely dead. The only new threads I've seen lately are "brazil?", in communities that have nothing to with Brazil.

      3. There's no blogging functions. Sure, don't have to use it, but would be nice. Then I can use the blog functions to bitch about Brazilians invading Orkut.

      4. Brazilian invasion. Need I say more?
    • ...1. Dont be so DAMN slow...

      Here's what I got when selecting my state on i-neighbors.org:

      Fatal error: Maximum execution time of 30 seconds exceeded in F:\ineighbors\inc\e_table.inc on line 194

      He needs some help.

    • "How is this more than a zip-code structured Orkut community system?"

      Well, hopefully it will only work with US zip codes so the Brazillians won't be on it.

      For those of you about to mod me down, this is a joke. I was poking fun at the recent invasion of Portugese speakers.

  • Full circle (Score:3)

    by jjoyce ( 4103 ) on Thursday September 02, 2004 @08:03PM (#10145116)
    It's sort of like the joke about the totally immersive new video game called "Actual Reality." If you want to communicate with your neighbors and find out their interests, why not just ask them face to face?
    • computer science is no more about science than telescopes are to astronomy.
    • If you want to communicate with your neighbors and find out their interests, why not just ask them face to face?

      Because their face is inside their house, probably near their computer?

      You act like this is anti-social, yet it's the exact opposite. The idea behind this kind of networking is to find people in your neighborhood that you can relate to and interact with in Actual Reality.

      But you propose I go around my neighborhood knocking on random doors to locate these people? Other than at neighborhood part

  • More than a bit over-ambitious (Score:5, Insightful)

    by iammaxus ( 683241 ) on Thursday September 02, 2004 @08:07PM (#10145136)

    As other posters pointed out, there are few neighborhoods registered so far. One of the reasons this is so is that i-neighbors has, in my opinion, a ridiculous policy for what a neighborhood is: "An area of fewer than 500 households, or a single apartment complex." If they get even 5% participation across the US, an incredible feat by website standards, they would have on the average, less than 25 households in a neighborhood. That's a pretty minimal selection of people. I don't see what the point of making neighborhoods so small is; I can easily get to at least 10,000 households by foot in my average, suburban town. If this think wants any chance of survival, they better change that rule.

    • If they get even 5% participation across the US, an incredible feat by website standards, they would have on the average, less than 25 households in a neighborhood. That's a pretty minimal selection of people.

      You're thinking "on average." I'm thinking, what if everyone in my neighborhood got on here and we could plan things, talk about problems in our area, etc?

      I don't see what the point of making neighborhoods so small is; I can easily get to at least 10,000 households by foot in my average, suburban t
      • I don't know what my neighborhood is. There is my town, which has maybe a little less than 10k households, but there are neighboring towns also. And yes, I think a lot of the point of making it a geographically local thing is so you can easily turn online relationships (I'm not just talking about dating) into "real" relationships.
    • I can easily get to at least 1% of 10,000 households by foot in my average, suburban town.

      If you go to anything close to 10k households in my average, suburban town and lurk about knowing no one, trying to meet new "friends" at their homes, you'll be explaining yourself to the local constabulary forthwith!

      And we like it that way!

      Or do we?

  • I have a better idea. (Score:4, Interesting)

    by Viceice ( 462967 ) on Thursday September 02, 2004 @08:14PM (#10145177)
    Having a web based service requires that people sign up. Most people would be reluctant to, maybe because of laziness, maybe because of indifference.

    If you want to get more people involved, how about getting community funded Internet? Start a community association, then raise funds to put in a reasonable pipe and a few 802.11g router/ APs and provide the service FOC to members of the community.

    The only cavet would be that all users will have to see a community page as home page on first load and the DHCP lease expires every 12 hours.

    That way the community is more involved, as it provides an incentive for members of the community to participate.

  • It is only for English-speaking North American countries for now.

    Lack of time to expand, or just a revenge for Orkut?

    • Re:North America only (Score:3, Informative)

      by Kris_J ( 10111 ) *
      How hard would it be to code for all countries? Five boxes: Country, state/region/prefecture, suburb/town/city, Zip/Postcode, Street name. Say hello to your neighbours.
      • >
        How hard would it be to code for all countries? Five boxes: Country, state/region/prefecture, suburb/town/city, Zip/Postcode

        Yeah, but...

        ...then you loose all kinds of data entry integrity checks, like zip code format per country, lists of valid states, etc.

  • I just spent *my time* enterting data for my neighborhood only to be confronted with error messages.

    Even though it told me there was an "error" on the creation of my village, it was created anyway, however I am not recognized as the founder.

    Upon attempting to join my neighborhood I was then confronted with more error messages.

    Please - don't waste your time like I did. This is alpha software, and that needs to be noted conspicuously.

    This level of unprofessionalism is unacceptable.

  • Gainesville Fl. Slashdot Meetup. (Score:4, Interesting)

    by Chatmag ( 646500 ) <editor@chatmag.com> on Thursday September 02, 2004 @08:25PM (#10145234) Homepage Journal
    I thought Slashdot Meetup [meetup.com] was already doing basically the same thing.

    How about more people around Gainesville/North Florida sign up so we can get together.
  • The site/service/whatnot could just as well defined the "neighborhood" to any interest, event or location, and the site would've been exponentially more interesting.

    Combine that with the ability to form sub-communities and you could get the real interesting stuff like:

    "started MIT 1980, born in Brooklyn, NY and likes to paint abstract paintings"

    That's just an example, the sub-community could be anything really.
    • I imagine it's limited to geographical areas because most websites don't do it (some do, not all). If you just have hoods made by depending on interests it's just like having a whole bunch of web-boards in 1. It's purpose is to encourage in-person interaction, that wouldn't be achieved if it didn't take geographical areas into account. Now setting it up so it's a geographical area PLUS interests would further it's cause to initiate in person interaction. However it might not want to be too popular or else
  • If it's by neighborhood -- Why is a complete registration required? Craigslist [craigslist.org] also does it by geographical location, but it does NOT require a registration before it lets you see anything. In fact, I can already find 5 badminton partners [craigslist.org] within a short driving distance.
  • This is the first time I've gotten interested in social networks. I've been offered gmail accounts by several friends, but this is different. You can relate that to real-life people around you, and you can make friends where it matters: next door.

    Also the potential for kidnappers and child molesters increases with this service, so the rules of Internet safety still applies. Beyond the 'general neighborhood', or say upto 2 blocks away, no other information about the person should be shared IMHO.

    I'd be inte

  • What happened to the E-everything? (Score:3, Funny)

    by beaviz ( 314065 ) on Thursday September 02, 2004 @09:00PM (#10145414) Homepage Journal
    iThink i have Inough Idiocity from my I-neighbor with my iMac and iPod downloading from my I-neighbor's Insecure iPass AP.
  • Thats why Im on the computer, finding like minded people around the world. If my hobbies change to domestic violence and drug dealing then I'll go hang out with my neighbours.

  • Granularity problems in Canada (Score:3, Interesting)

    by Arrgh ( 9406 ) on Thursday September 02, 2004 @09:10PM (#10145463) Homepage Journal
    They subdivide Canada into provinces and then FSAs (Forward Sortation Areas, otherwise known as the first three characters of your postal code) before letting you drill down to the neighbourhood level. Unfortunately, this particular way they've chosen to break down the geographic hierarchy is oversimplified and basically unworkable, at least for Canada.

    My neighbourhood (Mount Pleasant, in the East Side of Vancouver, BC) doesn't follow neat FSA boundaries. The hierarchy should be a little fuzzier, like Country -> State/Prov -> Region -> City -> Neighbourhood, and the "city" part should probably be optional, because there are neighbourhoods that cross civic boundaries. My friend who lives four blocks east and ten blocks south is most definitely in the same neighbourhood, but he lives in a different FSA.
  • I can see the submitter's apartment building from my front window but I have no idea who they are. Not that any Slashdot reader could ever be accused of seldom going outside to meet one's neighbours...

    P.S. I don't play badminton, but I do play squash.

  • the facebook (Score:2, Informative)

    by ff3j ( 767130 )
    There is a similar site called The Facebook [thefacebook.com] for universities. You can only join if you actually go to one of the listed universities (they have alot). Since universities are basically like huge communities, it's basically the same idea. It's really quite useful, because you can see people that are in your classes, live in your residence hall, etc. It also has a quite extensive search function. So, for example, you could search for "freshman" "females" living in "yourdorm" whose interests include "heavy

  • Power: Scary (Score:3, Interesting)

    by fm6 ( 162816 ) on Thursday September 02, 2004 @09:51PM (#10145727) Homepage Journal
    I seem to be the first person to join I-Neighbors from this neighborhood [i-neighbors.org]. As such, I'm the "founder": my description of the neighborhood and its boundaries is official, and changes can't be made without my permission. What if I go mad with power?
  • Where I just leaned over my fence and said "Hi" to my neighbours.

    Maybe I should patent that ....
  • So we're creating a virtual neighborhood of... A real neighborhood? Forgive me, but there is just something perversely wrong with this. If you don't want or like to interact with your neighbors IRL, why in the world would you do want to do it over the net?!?? What could the internet possibly add here worthy of i-neighbors existance???? Freakin bake some brownies, ring the doorbell and shoot the shit for a while. Having a few real beers with a live person is better than putting a 10x10 pixel picture of one a

    • If you don't want or like to interact with your neighbors IRL, why in the world would you do want to do it over the net?!??

      Your argument presumes we can find neighbors around us or that we have no interest in them. A lot of people work long hours at work, then come home and do not know people around them. Or they are busy with their own lives and don't have the kind of time it would take to get to know people around them.

      What could the internet possibly add here worthy of i-neighbors existance????

  • but you could try asking in the 'Canada East' subforum of the 'Places to Play' forum over at www.badmintoncentral.com

  • Terrible idea, and here's why.. (Score:4, Insightful)

    by Dr_LHA ( 30754 ) on Thursday September 02, 2004 @11:14PM (#10146169) Homepage
    One of the best things about the internet is that you can pretty much guarantee that the weird fucks that talk to you on it don't live anywhere near you, so you'll never have to be stalked by them in real life.
  • The Face Book [thefacebook.com] is a social network for people in the same college or university. You can fill out classes you're taking, and then see all the people who are also taking it, as well as fill out where you live, etc. Very popular with a lot of the schools that it supports (listing is on the home page).

  • AKA (Score:3, Funny)

    by _ph1ux_ ( 216706 ) on Friday September 03, 2004 @01:28AM (#10146777)
    Otherwise known as the "National Sex Offenders Registry"
  • plazes.com [plazes.com]?

    From their website:
    Plazes is the first global location-aware interaction and geo-information system, connecting you with the people and Plazes in your area and all over the world. It is the navigation system for your social life.
  • And yet such services are rarely available.

    The Postcode system here narrows you down to a few hundred feet, and it does so with math, rather than arbitrarily drawn boundaries.

    This implementation would be completely trivial here, but was probably a pain in the ass in the US.

  • First, it told me my e-mail address was invalid. I may have typed that in wrong, but I see other problems. It has a space for nearby neighborhoods but no way to declare them. It has me signed up to a neighborhood I never picked 3000 miles away from me, that I can't get rid of. If I try to subscribe to that neighborhood so it will allow me to leave it, it says I'm already subscribed but doesn't provide an unsubscribe link but it does for all others. Difficult navigation between areas. Has place for pic

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