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Facebook goes Local?
By Cameron Ferroni | November 5, 2007
In the beginning, there was Facebook. In many ways it was the ultimate hyper-local site. Primarily focused on schools and colleges, it provided a great way for people to stay in touch with folks in their “community” (not to mention to meet new people). However, fast forward a few years and now that it’s wide open to anyone with a pulse (sorry, email address) it has lost a ton of it’s “neighborhood” feel. It has become harder and harder to find people within a geographic location of relevance - sure you can see everyone in Seattle (and if you aren’t careful with your privacy settings all of them can see you), but the universe has expanded in a pretty dramatic way (much like the rest of the Internet). There really isn’t a sense of “people that are near me”.
As I was playing around with a bunch of the apps on Facebook, I stumbled across the Neighborhoods app at http://apps.facebook.com/neighborhoods/Default.aspx. It doesn’t do much right now, but I do like the fact that you can easily set your neighborhood, and see which Facebook folks live in your neighborhood. There is a way to post photographs of your neighborhood, have discussions, and more. There are a ton of interesting other things that could be latched onto this - as you can imagine - but at its core, just having this small connection back to the community is a nice start….
Topics: Web site, Community, Local Search |
November 8th, 2007 at 3:07 pm
If any of the big social nets wake up to the local search opportunity they could probably do a lot of damage to the other players in the space. If I were one of the big IYPs I wouldn’t be spending as much time on worrying about what my Facebook app strategy is as much as what my Facebook partner strategy is.
And thanks for the link!