Neighbors Go

I analyzed the web site Neighbors Go for this post. Neighbors covers the North Texas area and has so many neighborhoods you can choose. It breaks Dallas into several sections and that makes it feel more neighborly. At the top of the page, you can choose what neighborhood you want to look at. Then you can choose what interests you have. There are choices like family, faith, travel, shopping, etc. Finally , use can choose what you want to see. There are several choices here too. For example you can pick stories, pictures, blogs, events, etc. For this post, I chose the Oak Cliff area of Dallas to look at. I looked both the north and south areas of Oak Cliff.

The stories were mostly postings of upcoming local events. Or local news happening in the area. There was a story about a woman’s 59 year-old sister who just returned from Iraq. Or a story about how Mountain View College wants to increase enrollment of transfer students.

There was a video about a local sculptor who likes the new green line. There is a picture of a cat dressed up for Halloween. And there are several blogs talking about anything from the military to obesity to country music. It appears to be 100% user content driven and very localized.

The web site did a kind of twist of typical web site 2.0 elements. There is navigation on the top, but it is as casual as picking a neighborhood and what kinds of things you want to see about that neighborhood. There is a search box and help link at the top.  At the bottom, there’s info about the site and terms and conditions.

Although the site says it contains about 75 communities that post various material to the web site, but it doesn’t seem like a news site. It seems more like a community bulletin board. It’s way more interactive, of course. Users can post stuff to the site and comment on other users’ postings. There is a lot of choice as to what neighborhood to look at and what kind of media you can see. There are links to Twitter and Facebook, so it does utilize social media. Also the way “news” (or your child’s recital information) is presented, it’s feels more like a social site rather than a news site.

There’s a couple things I don’t like about it. I really don’t like that every time you click on something, it opens in a new window. That’s really irritating after you realize you have like 20 open windows. The other thing I don’t like is how little actual hard news is on the site.

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