
Neighbourly by Google - prostoalex
https://neighbourly.google.com/
======
jklinger410
I have been thinking a lot about creating localized versions of services like
reddit and facebook so that people could be more in touch with what is
actually going on around them instead of this kind of national narrative.

It seems unfair that there is only room for so many famous people, so many
inventors, so many journalists, because all of the attention (money)
aggregates towards the top.

If you could have, say, a local Martha Stewart that actually can subsist and
become quite wealthy by sticking to a couple counties in a State, the whole
system becomes much more valuable to each individual who participates.

The way it is now your value is almost nonexistent, there is such a high
barrier of entry to virality, it's like winning the lottery. What if it was
easier to go viral in your own home town, build a career off of it, and never
have to make the front page of any national website?

Sorry, bit of a rant, but services like this hint that other people are
thinking similarly. I'd like to see a much bigger push into fragmenting the
web, and moreso fragmenting the attention share. It moves much like the
economy, trickle up.

~~~
gowld
[http://nextdoor.com](http://nextdoor.com) is the leader in this space.

~~~
hungerstrike
I didn’t like having to give them my real address or phone number. I hope the
Google version of this is a little more lenient, but I doubt it will be.

~~~
alanbernstein
Would you prefer all users be allowed access to any neighborhood group they
choose?

~~~
hungerstrike
No, I would prefer that they just use my geo-location.

I wouldn’t even mind if they asked me every couple of months or so to verify
my location.

~~~
Royalaid
Spoofing geolocation is possible too.

~~~
hungerstrike
Big deal. How many people are actually going to go to the trouble to do that
to talk to people in my neighborhood where they don’t even live?

I could have easily tricked Nextdoor into doing whatever I wanted to. But
shouldn’t have to waste my time.

------
brightball
So Nextdoor will have a competitor soon. I was honestly wondering when this
would happen because the geographic based reviews and advertising approach
totally aligns with the type of service that Google would NOT kill after a
couple of years.

Maps, business reviews and advertising...only makes sense.

~~~
luddaite
Why isn't Facebook competing more actively in this market? It seems that the
data they have access to is better suited for this scenario.

~~~
mvid
They used to have a neighborhood feature, but I am guessing it just fizzled.
Also I don’t really want my neighbors to have a view into my Facebook profile

------
scarface74
Hopefully this doesn't become the same toxic hell stew that NextDoor can
be....

[https://www.buzzfeed.com/carolineodonovan/racial-
profiling-i...](https://www.buzzfeed.com/carolineodonovan/racial-profiling-is-
still-a-problem-on-nextdoor)

~~~
ajross
Racist busybodies were nattering racists long before they had a social media
platform. If anything, platforms like Nextdoor are helping the issue by
shining light on it, allowing the nutjobs just enough of a safe space to feel
free to talk while letting the rest of us see what they're doing.

Regardless, Nextdoor in my area is hardly toxic. It's actually pretty stale --
mostly a mix of home services referrals and junk for sale. They've cranked up
the ad content very significantly over the last year without really
bringing/encouraging much in the way of better neighborhood content. I don't
know if Google is going to do it any better, but some competition in this
space certainly couldn't hurt.

~~~
acdha
It’s true that nuts existed before but social media can have an amplifying
effect when it helps them find fellow travelers and convince themselves that
their views are common and normal.

Anyone building platforms needs to take that problem seriously since it leads
to both serious real-world negatives (e.g. antivax) and driving more
reasonable people away.

------
kinow
NZ has, [https://www.neighbourly.co.nz/](https://www.neighbourly.co.nz/) which
looks like a local competitor with same name. Things might get a bit confusing
here if Google's stars to pick popularity

~~~
berkut
Interesting that Google are using the non-US (British, Aus, NZ) spelling as
well...

~~~
abrowne
All the examples (people and neighborhood names, the question about the salwar
suit) sound South Asian to me, so maybe it's launching first in India?

~~~
alexgolive
In the mission, it mentions Indian cities specifically "In big cities across
India, it’s getting harder to get good answers"
[https://neighbourly.google.com/mission/](https://neighbourly.google.com/mission/)

------
prepend
I can’t wait for them to suck at this and then quit eventually.

I really wish they would just become a Platform company and let the next doors
of the world build on them and let goog take 30% of revenue.

They are bad at network/human stuff. As evidenced by this site “coming soon.”

~~~
antirez
What's worse is that by network effect certain bad Google products killed good
non-Google products. Then the Google product was retired or never evolved and
so forth.

------
avar
Prediction: This app is just an A/B test between A = asking the users of the
Google Maps app structured questions and B = This app doing so with machine
learning & user-powered Q&A.

Depending on how that goes one or the other will be removed within a year.

~~~
stevenwoo
They already sort of do some checking of their location services with follow
up queries in the Android Rewards app. I would swear a large percentage of
stores/location it asks me if I have visited recently are stores that I have
never heard of but it either thinks I visited or is doing some sort of sanity
check to make sure I am answering honestly.

------
scrollaway
Google has been doubling down on the q&a approach of asking users common
questions and turning those into datasets and features. This follows suit.

------
davidw
Wonder if it'll get content like
[https://twitter.com/bestofnextdoor](https://twitter.com/bestofnextdoor)

Nextdoor is a hive of NIMBYism.

------
jroseattle
I'm seeing comparisons to NextDoor and/or other hyper-local apps. While this
service has the focus at a neighborhood level, the premise seems to be more
quora-meets-yelp-meets-neighborhood.

I question these content-generation-as-process apps, and whether users are
exhausted of them. One of the reasons I believe NextDoor works so well is that
it doesn't try to be the neighborhood reference guide. This is opposed to
starting with the premise of answer-a-question, as this service seems to
drive. I'm also speaking from the standpoint of my little neighborhood in
Seattle, so as with everything -- your mileage may vary.

Just an observation: reading through the mission posted on the site, this
seems to be geared toward cities in India? The footer allows for language
change and lists "UK English", "India English", and other non-English
languages. I wonder if this service intends to support other countries when
they release.

------
osrec
Anyone else seeing India specific examples on the landing page? I'm British
Asian, and was quite surprised when the first example was a question about a
local salwar kameez tailor...

~~~
alexgolive
It mentions Indian cities specifically in the mission page "In big cities
across India, it’s getting harder to get good answers"
[https://neighbourly.google.com/mission/](https://neighbourly.google.com/mission/).
I'm a European living in the US, so it's unlikely to be doing some kind of
special targeting.

~~~
osrec
Wow, that is very India focused indeed... They even mention the deluge of good
morning messages typical of Indian WhatsApp groups!

------
parliament32
Not a huge issue but... why is the entire page of marketing and examples East
Indian? What is a "salwar suit"?

Is this a feature that's coming out globally or just in India?

~~~
g8oz
India? Oh boy, as if there wasn't enough neighborhood gossip going on there,
now it's going online.

~~~
anonnel
Making neighborhood gossip easier is worrying on many levels.

A hack that has been used in the past to scale totalitarian social control is
to employ what is essentially a viral enforcement mechanism: basically,
getting people to inform on their neighbors. It only takes one or two visible
instances of this behavior with a violent outcome and it replicates quickly,
following an exponential growth rate until the population is saturated with
informants.

Reporting on neighbors and peers is much of the glue which has held together
the worst authoritarian regimes: DPRK, East Germany, Nazi Germany ... as well
as being a primary strategy for causing the revolutions which put those
regimes in place.

A platform like this:

\- lowers the friction of informing

\- is vulnerable to anonymity / spoofing / automation / remote manipulation

\- allows for stories of informing to persist in the community memory as
always-online posts, increasing their effect across time

\- is connected to a de facto surveillance apparatus (the internet) to boot

------
duxup
I assume this is a response to NextDoor?

I look forward to the next 'bear in the neighborhood' scare hosted by Google
;)

~~~
tlb
Wild animal activity is relevant to some people. We've had mountain lions kill
deer within 100 meters of our property. Better to keep the dogs in when
they're around.

NextDoor and email lists are a terrible way of disseminating scares. I'd
rather have a "apex predator weather" feature that tells me, day-by-day,
whether to keep the dogs in.

~~~
duxup
It is a valid thing to be aware of.

Unfortunately / fortunately in my area ... there was no bear (at least no
evidence) and it was HIGHLY unlikely to have occurred (bears haven't been
around these parts for decades).

But there was a siting, and lots of photos of bear (deer) poo, and trampled
flower beds as evidence!

~~~
j-c-hewitt
A baby bear killed six of my chickens.

------
ninkendo
Yet another google service that will be dropped in one of their "spring
cleanings" in a few years.

~~~
willart4food
The secret of Innovation is to keep on trying and failing. Not everything is
always a win. Midas touch is a fable, not reality.

~~~
MBCook
The problem is Google’s size.

1\. Try out new business

2\. Take over the market due to Google’s name/search power

3\. Decide business isn’t worth it and pull out

4\. No one is left, people have to start from scratch again

~~~
estel
Which of the businesses they've dropped is this true for? Few of the examples
I can think of were market leaders when they were dropped, and none of those
were monopolising the market completely.

~~~
WorldMaker
Google Reader? The diaspora that followed is often considered to be the
"death" of RSS, and certainly the "death" of "Social RSS". RSS usage in
general did tank after Google Reader.

Though, there's a correlation/causation question there. Google Reader shutdown
to entrench Google's attempt at a walled garden social network, but Google was
considered late to the "walling in your garden" party at the time, so market
forces (Facebook, Twitter) what they were at the time, it's possible that even
if Reader didn't shutdown, RSS probably was "doomed".

Similarly, Google Talk? For a brief period _everyone_ was using XMPP (whether
they knew it or not), to the point where even Facebook capitulated to using
XMPP for real-time communications, partly to integrate with Google Talk, just
in time for Google to drop most Talk support and XMPP support in the "upgrade"
to Hangouts.

Again, things are washy in the correlation/causation question. If Google had
pushed Talk longer, would XMPP be more of a thing today? Or was the walled
garden communications network too tempting to the market that it would have
gone that way anyway?

Personally, I think Google losing a lot of its "roots" in trying to use
standards to best fit (RSS, XMPP), versus rolling everything
internally/proprietarily was a key change in the web at the time, and I'm
willing to ascribe it more to the causation side of things, but there's
certainly a healthy debate to both sides.

~~~
exikyut
Hmm.

This comment gave me an idea: what does Trends say for RSS?

It has two results:

\- For the search term:
[https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=all&q=rss](https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=all&q=rss)

\- For the "computer file format":
[https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=all&q=%2Fm%2F0...](https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=all&q=%2Fm%2F0n5tx)

Both charts are nearly identical.

There's a noticeable blip in March 2013 when the closure was announced, but
that blip sits within a concretely downward trend.

I had to dig a bit to locate the very tiny downward slope in July when Reader
actually shut down; there's nothing noticeable there.

------
zmmmmm
So there's a whole card about how safe it is and how no contact info is
shared, and right above it is a card where someone has posted with their
picture visible, a location marker and a time since they were there. Maybe I'm
reading a lot into one example on their marketing page, but I really hope
Google _has_ thought through security.

------
nmstoker
So little to go on, but the big challenge will be how to get value from the
inevitably idiotic questions people will ask. This is a massive problem on
Google Maps, it's inundated with questions that are either:

1.answered in the place description that questioners clicked right past

2\. not suited to crowd sourcing, such as things that require a rep from the
business to approve ("Can I get a children's cot put into room 643?")

And there's the Amazon Q&A issue with answers too: so many responses with "no,
I don't know how to answer that", because people don't think enough to realise
that not answering is a more appropriate response when you don't know on sites
like that!

------
mrleiter
That's kinda nifty for advertisers, if Google will allow advertising there
(which I assume they will). Hyper-local advertising surely has its perks: low
cost/high success I think are quite possible.

~~~
niftich
Hyperlocal advertising is the space that tries to gather up the long tail as
the efficacy of mainstream adtech is questioned.

Ad money is dominated by spray-and-pray big name brand awareness whose
correspondence to conversions is opaque, but most of online adtech is about
tracking metrics for particular targeted ads, and big buyers are frustrated
about their opaqueness and questioning their value [1]. Then there's the long
tail of everyone else, from a small band to a local restaurant, who are just
trying to get their names out there, but lack the clout to lobby Facebook's ad
policies.

This hyperlocal advertising is what many Facebook ads have been tending
towards. It's only natural that Google would try to corner as much of it as it
can, with services that are more content-driven than Maps.

[1]
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16362705#16363374](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16362705#16363374)

------
everdev
Twitter tried this (jelly.co) and it didn't catch on.

I think the challenge is that the question base is so broad and most local
experience revolves around things to see and do, which is largely a solved
problem between Yelp, StubHub, Google Maps and Google Search.

Also, I've found that if people don't want to use the massive number of local
reviews already on those sites, they tend to ask their actual friends. Why ask
a single random person a question when dozens or hundreds have already posted
a review about a local experience?

------
firasd
Interesting. Although the mobile gold-rush is considered over, I think there's
still real potential in 'hyper-local' realtime information. There are some
examples of this--Waze for traffic, the 'Citizen' app for crime--but there's
so much more that can be visible. Power outages, roads needing repair... of
course it's (relatively) easy to make an app that tracks all this but the
tough part is giving people a reason or incentive to post the information.

~~~
0x00000000
I liked Yik Yak a lot before they destroyed it. It provided this type of
information and allowed people to ask local questions like what this looks
like it aims to do.

------
alexgolive
It mentions Indian cities specifically in the mission page "In big cities
across India, it’s getting harder to get good answers"
[https://neighbourly.google.com/mission/](https://neighbourly.google.com/mission/).
I'm a European living in the US, so it's unlikely to be doing some kind of
special targeting.

~~~
gowld
Look at the photos and screenshots, and the language options the bottom-right
corner of the home page. It's an app for Indian women, at least for now at
launch. (Indian Orkut?)

------
Jedd
I looked at nextdoor years ago, but they weren't willing to let users log in
from Australia. They said that would be coming real soon now...

Nabo is an Australian system, but lacks the features of nextdoor - notably the
ability to have subgroups specifically for apartment blocks.

There's a few other systems out there, but they're usually non free, or
rubbish, or both.

------
earenndil
I'm calling it now: google will discontinue it and it will be looked back upon
just like google reader/wave.

------
tomkinson
S̶o̶f̶t̶w̶a̶r̶e̶ Google is eating the world.

I'm actually surprised that they aren't pulling back a bit. Antitrust case is
not near in this climate, but it will happen eventually and it's becoming
harder with their ever growing tentacles to avoid or reverse. They are going
to be their own worst enemy in the end.

~~~
jacksmith21006
Doubt you will see them pull back. Glad they don't and keep pushing.

The big one was yesterday ordering 62k cars for the Waymo ride sharing
service.

------
myth_buster
Google maps already has the _Local Guide_ feature and _Ask the community_
section which is very similar to this.

------
z3t4
Google probably see that many people are searching on Google for such
information and they plan to steal the users from current sites. I wonder if
this is Google's new growth strategy - find out what is hot by looking at what
people are searching for, then try to enter that market.

------
halamadrid
Is that competitor for Nextdoor? It would be interesting to see Nextdoor's
reaction to this launch.

~~~
alelefant
In the two years I've been a home owner and on Nextdoor, the only feature I've
noticed they introduced was ads.

~~~
askafriend
I'm also a user and I've noticed significant changes.

In that time I’ve noticed Real Estate, Ads, Marketplaces, Interest groups,
completely redesigned apps, etc. and probably a bunch of stuff that I haven’t
noticed as well.

------
pmilla1606
Interesting - and on the same day as another (hyper?)local app:
[https://techcrunch.com/2018/05/31/area-120-subway-
pigeon/](https://techcrunch.com/2018/05/31/area-120-subway-pigeon/)

------
oculusthrift
" Any affordable maths private tuition around here?"

1\. Doesn't sound like proper english

2\. Is this targeted towards indians or something? Everything I am seeing
seems to indicate that. Such as " ayurvedic chemist " and "salwar"

~~~
aatharuv
Maths is perfectly standard Indian or British English.

The neighborhood mentioned in the screen shots, "Andheri East" is in Mumbai.
Mumbai's lingua franca is Hindi, and Marathi is the state language of
Maharashtra which Mumbai is the capital of, so it seems likely that they're
starting the rollout in Mumbai, given that these are two of the language
choices.

------
Apocryphon
This isn't just a competitor with Nextdoor. It might also compete with Quora,
or at least fill the local need that Q&A platform can't address. Might also be
a less scammy alternative to Craigslist.

------
merinowool
Looks like an ideal tool for local drug deals. Could this be a new Instagram?

~~~
reaperducer
That's what Facebook Marketplace is for.

~~~
merinowool
It is funny how LE focused on darknet meanwhile the real market runs just fine
on regular internet through popular sites.

------
RestlessMind
I hope someone from Google answers this - why should I use this? Is there any
guarantee that this will be around 3 years from now once the original team
gets promoted and moves on?

------
lecro
[https://i.imgur.com/K4YLt6E.jpg](https://i.imgur.com/K4YLt6E.jpg)

It looks to me that Google applies some kind of personalization to my landing
page.

~~~
exikyut
Are you in Russia?

(I am _very_ curious about your account, btw. This is your 2nd comment ever,
after the first in 2009.)

------
shishy
I was wondering when something like this would come out. My community uses a
Facebook group, and I've seen others do something similar (or even email
listservs)

------
softwarefounder
It's possible that this could be killed off in a few years, but more likely
that it will be absorbed into Google Maps and/or Reviews

------
benevol
I wonder when the day will come when we admit that we have to call the Web
"Googlenet".

------
dgudkov
It seems like the concept of local guides on Google Maps is getting to a new
level.

------
sriku
More reason to be glued to phones instead of actually talking to neighbours?

------
floatingatoll
Dear Google HN readers, “stiching” is misspelled in the second screenshot.

~~~
adrianmonk
As long as we're reporting issues, the language chooser at the bottom right is
white text on a white background when I actually click it. Whichever one I put
my mouse over becomes white on blue, and I can read it. This is while using
Chrome on Linux.

~~~
saagarjha
Seems to be a native dropdown on my computer, so are you sure it's not your
theme affecting it?

------
jeremiahwv
Communication problems need to be solved with protocols, not apps.

------
HuangYuSan
"Coming soon to your neighbourhood" Is it though?

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amelius
Who will own the data? Google or the community?

------
mholt
Anyone know how this integrates with Maps? I could imagine some really cool
innovations by applying machine learning or somehow connecting the data from
this app to Maps users.

------
l33tbro
Slight tangent, but what's with the Yahoo purple?

------
benatkin
I'm annoyed as hell that a US company is using the UK spelling of
"neighborly".

~~~
nisse72
Are you also annoyed by Under Armour?

~~~
benatkin
You bet, haha. I don't think it's a useful reaction, but it's my reaction.

------
hartator
Great name. /s

