The Promise Of Hyperlocal Social Networks

I am a great believer in the premises of hyperlocal social media and hyperlocal social tools, as well.

The issue in both niches is to figure out what it is that people naturally want to do on a hyperlocal scale, and we have had a number of experiments that have demonstrated this invariant, which I will dub as the Law of The Excluded Hyperlocal:

Whatever it is that people will naturally do in successful hyperlocal media or tools will turn out not to be what they do in successful non-hyperlocal media or tools.

Or, more simply,

Any successful hyperlocal social tool will not look like Facebook with neighborhoods.

There is a lot of new experimentation going on around hyperlocal social networks. I was an active user of Plazes, way back in the day, and I gave Dodgeball and Brightkite a real try. But I have been uninterested in Foursquare — perhaps I am outside the demographic? — and haven’t really clicked with that, or Gowalla, or Facebook’s recent efforts. For me, they are failing.

However, I have been having some interesting discussions with the folks at DeHood about their product directions. [Disclosure: DeHood is a client.]

To be completely truthful, when I first saw DeHood back at the NYC TechCrunch Disrupt, I thought they were trying to do too much, because of ignoring the Law Of The Excluded Hyperlocal, and that the result was a sort of jumble.

However, I now consider DeHood as an ongoing experiment around a number of ideas about using online social tools to increase connection in the offline world at a local and hyperlocal level. They have just released a new version of their iPhone app, as part of their product push.

For example, DeHood supports the idea of users posting ‘news’ that is locally relevant and findable, like this example from London, where the topmost post is about a local flooding.

This highly localized, ‘souveillance’ by on-the-ground observers strikes me as a good pivot of local social involvement. Like announcing the empty space on the corner is going to be a chocolate shop, or that the Smith’s house has finally been sold.

One of the topics I have been talking about with Babak Hedayati, the CEO of DeHood, is how people might interact around location.

DeHood has implementations of Foursquare-like gaming around being a regular — in this case, being the king or queen of a location, but I am more interested in the idea of being a ‘local’: someone with a great deal of local knowledge. Which dry cleaner does the best job? Where are the best happy hour cocktails on a Thursday afternoon? Those sorts of questions.

DeHood also allows users to explore far away cities, although the implementation looks like the stream of updates that a local would get, which I think has to be reconsidered, because non-locals won’t know enough in many case to make sense of information that is purely of interest to someone on the ground — like a local flood in Putney, outside of London — and are more likely to want to see sights of interest to non-locals, like famous museums, monuments, building, restaurants, and so on. I think the intersection of non-locals with knowledgeable locals is a very interesting area for future investigation.

But Babak has some interesting ideas about getting down to smaller locales, and supporting people’s interaction around those smaller radius areas, like well-known districts in major cities, like SOHO in New York City, or even areas that are only well-known by their denizens, like the South Park neighborhood in San Francisco. We recently talked about the idea of ‘20 minute’ neighborhoods, which is a concept that has been advanced by Sam Adams, the mayor of Portland, Oregon. A 20 minute neighborhood has all the amenities within a 20 minute walk: stores, bistros, post office, schools, parks, metro, etc. So one angle is to work this concept into DeHood, in future releases, so that stores, businesses and individuals would be ‘tagged’ by these locational cues.

related articles

• Why Be Mayor When You Can Be King? FourSquare Competitor DeHood Adds New Features (readwriteweb.com)
• DeHood for iPhone update goes hard. (thenextweb.com)
• DeHood’s New Products Merge Real and Virtual Neighborhoods (prweb.com)