29 ms·
Neighbourly by Google
- halamadrid 8y agoIs that competitor for Nextdoor? It would be interesting to see Nextdoor's reaction to this launch.
- alelefant 8y agoIn the two years I've been a home owner and on Nextdoor, the only feature I've noticed they introduced was ads.
- askafriend 8y agoI'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.
- scrollaway 8y agoGoogle has been doubling down on the q&a approach of asking users common questions and turning those into datasets and features. This follows suit.
- hartator 8y agoGreat name. /s
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- brightball 8y agoSo 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.
- nautilus12 8y agoGoogle just can't let anyone else corner the market on something. Its like a virus.
- rhizome 8y agoA virus that makes them create a half-stepping competitor before shutting the whole thing down in a couplefew years.
- krisdol 8y agoYep. At this point I’m burned out on google products and moving on. No way would I commit more data to google for something they’ll abandon when the person who used this project as their resume builder moves on to the next job.
- luddaite 8y agoWhy 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 8y agoThey 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
- mc32 8y agoRemember sidewalk? There have been a number of players who could have parlayed into nextdoors turf, but have not been successful. Google has the budget and heft, so maybe.
- IBM 8y agoUnless they're going to leverage their monopoly in Search or Android to get into this business, Nextdoor doesn't have anything to worry about. Google doesn't have a history of releasing products that succeed organically. And they probably will, but that's why the EU's antitrust cases against Google are so important!
- duxup 8y agoI assume this is a response to NextDoor? I look forward to the next 'bear in the neighborhood' scare hosted by Google ;)
- tlb 8y agoWild 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 8y agoIt 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 8y agoA baby bear killed six of my chickens.
- pmilla1606 8y agoInteresting - 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/
- parliament32 8y agoNot 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?
- gshrikant 8y agoLooking at the examples and how the product is spelled (British English) it seems like the product would be restricted to India.
- ovao 8y agoThe region selection options at the bottom of the page have the U.K., India, and two others in lettering I don't recognize.
- cmg 8y agoThe other two are Marathi and Hindi, both also spoken in India.
- vthallam 8y agoIt is first launched only in India [0] . I guess they will update the landing page as they expand to other markets. [0] -https://techcrunch.com/2018/05/30/google-launches-neighbourly/ https://techcrunch.com/2018/05/30/google-launches-neighbourl...
- g8oz 8y agoIndia? Oh boy, as if there wasn't enough neighborhood gossip going on there, now it's going online.
- anonnel 8y agoMaking 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
- avar 8y agoPrediction: 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.
- brian_herman 8y agoI hope you are right.
- stevenwoo 8y agoThey 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.
- mrleiter 8y agoThat'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 8y agoHyperlocal 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
- Apocryphon 8y agoThis 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.
- shishy 8y agoI 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)
- kinow 8y agoNZ 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
- jordansmithnz 8y agoYeah, was about to point out the same thing. I’m a little surprised - it’s one thing for a global tech giant to build a service that competes with yours, but it’s another to use exactly the same name. Is that actually allowed?
- ocdtrekkie 8y agoGiven someone could register Stripe, Inc. in a different US state than where Stripe, Inc. is incorporated: https://stripe.ian.sh/ https://stripe.ian.sh/ I would suggest... arguably, yes? Presumably within the realm of NZ, Neighbourly could go after Google for trademark infringement of some sort, if Google launches it in NZ, but from a global standpoint, what authority does anyone have to protect their name worldwide?
- EdwardDiego 8y agoCompany names aren't name protection. The only form of trading name protection is a trademark. So if neighbourly.co.nz wanted to expand into new markets, their next move would be a WIPO filing for their trademark - but you can't just register a trademark in a country and not trade under it there, it's easily challenged. And after having searched IPONZ's website, it appears that there's not even a registered trademark in NZ for neighbourly - so if Google were to start trading in NZ using "neighbourly", neighbourly.co.nz would have to rely on the passing off provisions of the Fair Trading Act and be able to produce evidence that Google had caused them loss by confusing their customers. TL;DR - trademarks are important. As an aside, based on spelling (-our vs. -or) I presume this Google product comes from a non-American market.
- TomK32 8y agoTook 7 years until there was "Gmail" in Germany, might be harder for google in NZ though if there's a company and not just an individual who holds the trademark.
- ninkendo 8y agoYet another google service that will be dropped in one of their "spring cleanings" in a few years.
- willart4food 8y agoThe secret of Innovation is to keep on trying and failing. Not everything is always a win. Midas touch is a fable, not reality.
- MBCook 8y agoThe 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 8y agoWhich 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 8y agoGoogle 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.
- floatingatoll 8y agoDear Google HN readers, “stiching” is misspelled in the second screenshot.
- adrianmonk 8y agoAs 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 8y agoSeems to be a native dropdown on my computer, so are you sure it's not your theme affecting it?
- saagarjha 8y agoI think this might be intentional, to give it a more "authentic" feel.
- scarface74 8y agoHopefully this doesn't become the same toxic hell stew that NextDoor can be.... https://www.buzzfeed.com/carolineodonovan/racial-profiling-is-still-a-problem-on-nextdoor https://www.buzzfeed.com/carolineodonovan/racial-profiling-i...
- strictnein 8y agoMy wife somehow became our neighborhood's leader or whatever it's called on NextDoor. Half the stuff is garbage like that. The other half is upper-middle class adults behaving like spoiled children.
- ajross 8y agoRacist 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 8y agoIt’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.
- powvans 8y agoThey seem to have gotten the racist freak outs under control in my area. In the last year we’ve moved on to animal welfare freak outs. A couple of weeks ago there was a thread condemning jogging with your dog. The OP was pretty upset about someone jogging with their dog during the heat of the day. There’s plenty of validity to the concern that someone could overheat their dog, but the crazy just exploded from the woodwork. A flame war erupted and several of the commenters stopped just shy of calling for dog joggers to be stoned. Nextdoor seems to bring out a special brand of crazy.
- benatkin 8y agoI'm annoyed as hell that a US company is using the UK spelling of "neighborly".
- allenu 8y agoIt looks like it's UK and India only for now. See bottom right.
- ajonnav 8y agoIt's probably because (it looks like) the initial target market is India and India uses UK spellings.
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- deejaybog 8y agoLooks like a Google India initiative, which would explain the spelling.
- nisse72 8y agoAre you also annoyed by Under Armour?
- benatkin 8y agoYou bet, haha. I don't think it's a useful reaction, but it's my reaction.
- api_or_ipa 8y agoIt's just language, get over it. The rest of the English world lives with US bastardisations like 'color' and 'favour' just fine.
- vatueil 8y ago> US bastardisations like 'color' and 'favour' I believe the American spelling is "favor".
- mholt 8y agoAnyone 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.
- softwarefounder 8y agoIt'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 8y agoI wonder when the day will come when we admit that we have to call the Web "Googlenet".
- firasd 8y agoInteresting. 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 8y agoI 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.
- z3t4 8y agoGoogle 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.
- davidw 8y agoWonder if it'll get content like https://twitter.com/bestofnextdoor https://twitter.com/bestofnextdoor Nextdoor is a hive of NIMBYism.
- prepend 8y agoI 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 8y agoWhat'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.
- merinowool 8y agoLooks like an ideal tool for local drug deals. Could this be a new Instagram?
- reaperducer 8y agoThat's what Facebook Marketplace is for.
- merinowool 8y agoIt is funny how LE focused on darknet meanwhile the real market runs just fine on regular internet through popular sites.
- zmmmmm 8y agoSo 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.
- dgudkov 8y agoIt seems like the concept of local guides on Google Maps is getting to a new level.
- tomkinson 8y agoS̶o̶f̶t̶w̶a̶r̶e̶ 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 8y agoDoubt 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.
- osrec 8y agoAnyone 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 8y agoIt 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.
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- osrec 8y agoWow, that is very India focused indeed... They even mention the deluge of good morning messages typical of Indian WhatsApp groups!
- ac29 8y agoFrom the US, I only see British English, Indian English, and a couple of languages I don't recognize available in the language selector in the bottom right.
- saagarjha 8y agoThey're "India – Hindi" and "India - Marathi".
- jklinger410 8y agoI 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.
- icedchai 8y agoWe had this in the 80's and 90's with dialup BBSes. With the Internet / web, we lost the local "community" feel...
- tracker1 8y agoThere's still some out there (telnet), but mostly old Sysops, and Ansi/Ascii artists... It's not nearly the same as hitting local boards.
- 392c91e8165b 8y agoIt is just as cheap to access a telnet server half way around the world as one next door, so bringing up telnet is changing the subject.
- icedchai 8y agoYep, I used to run one... The problem is the "local community" aspect is gone... anyone can connect to these boards, but most people don't know how (or care to know.) It's not like the old days...
- everdev 8y agoTwitter 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?
- myth_buster 8y agoGoogle maps already has the _Local Guide_ feature and _Ask the community_ section which is very similar to this.
- l33tbro 8y agoSlight tangent, but what's with the Yahoo purple?
- alexgolive 8y agoIt 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 8y agoLook 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?)
- jeremiahwv 8y agoCommunication problems need to be solved with protocols, not apps.
- HuangYuSan 8y ago"Coming soon to your neighbourhood" Is it though?
- oculusthrift 8y ago" 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 8y agoMaths 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.
- lecro 8y agohttps://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 8y agoAre you in Russia? (I am very curious about your account, btw. This is your 2nd comment ever, after the first in 2009.)
- nmstoker 8y agoSo 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!
- amelius 8y agoWho will own the data? Google or the community?
- Jedd 8y agoI 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 8y agoI'm calling it now: google will discontinue it and it will be looked back upon just like google reader/wave.
- Proven 8y agoGoogle is the last place where I would either ask or answer such questions. Especially while logged in.
- sriku 8y agoMore reason to be glued to phones instead of actually talking to neighbours?
- jroseattle 8y agoI'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.
- RestlessMind 8y agoI 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?