Wired Magazine reports New York City residents are to get their own social network as the local government teams up with Nextdoor.com to provide a neighbourhood information service.
The aim of the partnership between Nextdoor.com and New York City is to improve the delivery of local services to residents.
The partnership means Nextdoor, which connects residents into geographic social networks based on their verified addresses, will be fully integrated with New York government departments, to be used by police, fire, utility, and other agencies. Nextdoor CEO Nirav Tolia anticipates the city will use the service to post information about power outages, construction notices, traffic accidents, and weather events like tropical storms, among many other potential use cases, bolstering municipal efficiency and citizen engagement.
On the face of it, this seems a great way for local government to communicate with residents, but it may be this arrangement turns out be a way to make hyperlocal media work.
A continued disappointment are the failures of creating local neighbourhood news services — known as hyperlocal media — with NBC recently closing down its Everyblock operation and AOL struggles with its Patch service.
Part of the problem is that hyperlocal news is labour intensive, doesn’t scale very well and without the locals becoming part of the online community, these services struggle to get traction.
Another aspect is the advertising model, local newspapers were insanely profitable when they were the main way for neighbourhood businesses and real estates agencies to advertise.
The web broke that model and Google’s failure to execute with its local business service has meant there isn’t an online replacement for the local advertising model.
So it may be that partnerships between local government and the online platforms are the way to make hyperlocal services work.
It will be interesting to see if the New York City partnership does become a model for hyperlocal news or just becomes a glorified and expensive community noticeboard.