Meet your neighbours

FROM: Gav Slater

What NEED does this meet?
One of the problems of living in a modern city is that there isn't really much of a community spirit anymore. You could live in the same street for year upon year, and never get to know the person in the house next door, or the flat over the landing.

What is the APPROACH?
The initial idea would be to do a trial on up to a hundred indiviual streets in a city (or several cities), build up a client base, then roll out the service bit by bit, possibly by the use of mail shots, and of course word of mouth, which should let the site snowball.

The basic premise should appeal to human curiosity, as people naturally want to know about their neighbours, but in most circumstances may be afraid to ask them directly

What are the BENEFITS to people?
It's all about building communites again, getting people in the same street talking to each other, and finding common interests. Living in a friendly, vibrant community is happier and more fulfilling than living in isolation.

What is the COMPETITION?
Friends Reunited has recently added a "my street" feature, but that is more to do with finding old friends, rather than making new ones. And of course, there are countless "community" sites on the web, but these are all geared towards bringing people together from all corners of the globe, not two ends of a short street.

What BUDGET & LOGISTICS are required?
Easy enough to roll out, would need a maximum of two servers, one for address/postcode data, and one for user data. The fron end would need probably a maximum of 10 different (dynamic) pages, and the data retrieval back-end would be fairly simple.

The biggest cost would be for bandwidth, if the site took off, as modern database servers can easily deal with 1000 users or 1,000,000 users, but once the data gets sent to the outside world, that's when things start to get expensive.