Won’t You Be My Neighbor… Again?

Posted on | February 1, 2009 |

It’s not a surprise that many of us have become further detached from our local communities as new technology and communication platforms have entered our lives. We have traded in our neighborhood  connections for new global networks—opened to us through the World Wide Web. This begs us to ask, Whatever happened to our sense of neighborhood?  Has technology killed it?

There is an online trend, however, that is bringing things back to the local level. The term is “hyper-local,” and while it isn’t entirely new, it certainly garnered a lot more attention this year. One site, Life Beat,  launched this spring and provides residential  communities (i.e., apartment complexes) a  communication platform for chit-chatting with neighbors about everything from borrowing a cup of sugar to reviews of local businesses.

Another hyper-local site is City Squares,  which allows people to search and review businesses and restaurants, connect with new people and find out about upcoming events in the neighborhood. It was only a matter of time before this trend really started taking off. Generic social networking sites like Myspace and Facebook paved the way for online communities, but they also created a race to drill deeper into specificity and niche. After Friendster, there was Petster. After Petster, there was Dogster. Sites like  Lifeat.com and Citysquares.com are charting the path for what’s to come on the hyper-local level.

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