Whenever a new man moves into my neighborhood, one of the mothers down the street immediately searches the Megan’s List database, which is dedicated to ID’ing sex offenders.
A new site, FatDoor, however, hopes to look on the brighter side of having neighbors. The startup crawls the Web for publicly available info (College, job, church, clubs, blogs) and is being designed to help neighbors establish commonalities from the getgo, rather than sitting in the isolated silos of today’s typical “Bowling Alone” neighborhood.
The site’s motto is “positive social change.” The company hopes that it will help the “neighborhood get stronger, help people develop friendships in their neighborhoods, and become more civic in their involvement in their communities.” It may also be used for more annoying things (telemarketing, real estate pitches etc.) But the site has taken pains to hire a privacy expert to minimize the inherent risks. If it works at all, one imagines it could be a nice complement to something like Zillow, and more dimensional.
Site founder Raj Abhyanker, a patent attorney and erstwhile local politician, has been making the rounds in the local space – he was a sponsor at our Local ’07 show. Last week, he posted launch news about the site on Wikipedia (although the post was taken down).
While it was up, the Wikipedia post noted that FatDoor will create a virtual city government where “the mayor” is selected based on a reputation system (i.e. # of connections, # of positive points). Runner-ups will be selected to a virtual city council. “In a later phase, we’ll have voting for a Governor of each U.S. state on FatDoor, and a President of the United States on FatDoor (e.g., based on links with residents in the United States),” writes Abhyanker.
I haven’t seen the site. I like the name but need to know more about the virtual city council concept, and potential privacy issues. But one imagines there are unique, compelling technologies associated with it. Abhynaker has filed for more than 42 patents based on various geo-spatial tools and technologies.
Certainly, there is some heavyweight talent associated with the site. Co-founder Chandu Thota, was the lead developer of Microsoft Virtual Earth. An early advisor was Sanjeev Agrawal, who runs marketing for TellMe.
A private iteration of the site launched April 12 in Cupertino, near San Jose. It will be made available to all Cupertino residents in early May, and the site will go wide May 29 to coincide with O’Reilly’s Where conference in San Jose. It expects to have 130 million people and business profiles at launch.
Hi Peter,
Thanks for the write-up!
Our goal is to bring communities together, and make them more locally and politically engaging. People will be able to make new friends right in their own neighborhoods. We are taking careful steps to ensure privacy while protecting the power of our platform.
To this end, we have retained Tara Lemmey (Homeland Security Internet Privacy Committee and former President of the EFF) and Lauren Gelman (Director of Stanford Law School’s Center of Internet and Society) as Strategic Advisors. They are helping us develop a strong privacy policy while protecting the power of our platform. Fatdoor, we hope, will be a site people love because it will make their own communities more engaging, friendly and approachable.
Note: There will be no information about kids on Fatdoor. Also, telephone information of residents will not be exposed unless users voluntarily choose to publish it. We are taking very careful steps to ensure that the site delivers a very positive message.
Also, one note : Sanjeev Agrawal is early strategic advisor, but is not an employee of Fatdoor. He is still with TellMe, post acquisition by Microsoft.
Thanks once again for the post, I’ll be in touch,
Kind regards,
Raj .
Hi peter, ps. your readers can find out more info on my thoughts on the future and Fatdoor at http://www.fatdoorblog.com
Raj
Hi Peter,
FatDoor have a stand at Web 2.0 expo, but they’re not showing anything yet.
Here’s what I’m hoping: I’d like the service to allow people to complain/praise their neighbors as far as how loud they are, party-throwing, inconveniencing, etc. I have a *crazy* upstairs neighbor that had I known about in advance, I’d never have moved in…
I have been working online real estate space since 99…saw so many people come and go. Zillow loaded with $57+M and most talent people you ever can met, I’m very doubtful they will succeed any time soon…they may figure out eventually…the reason is very simple : they do not have “the feel” for real estate…just not yet.
I met a FatDoor lead engineer in mid-Feb for a job at FatDoor…very smart, and decent guy. I still own him a demo. :) There are few reasons I did not deliever the demo…main reason I sensed that FatDoor soon or late will be in real estate space…so I am not suprised to see Peter’s post today….since my own startup ZeuPa will be in real estate too…
Social network provides the freedom in respect to space and time in people’s daily life….FatDoor sort of takes “space freedom” away….will be interesting to see how they will handle it.
I wish the best luck to FatDoor… ZeuPa and FatDoor will meet one day.
” A new site, FatDoor, however, hopes to look on the brighter side of having neighbors. The startup crawls the Web for publicly available info (College, job, church, clubs, blogs) and is being designed to help neighbors establish commonalities from the getgo, rather than sitting in the isolated silos of today’s typical “Bowling Alone” neighborhood”
it sounds to me that if you get to know your neighbors in such a virtual way- you will still end up having an “Alone” neighborhood. Sitting in front of the PC and learning about your neighbourhood- isn’t exactly interacting with your neighbours, you need to get up and out in order to do that..
Raj Abhankyer provides more detail on his fatdoorblog.com blog, May 12: ….
“As part of our private preview launch, we are in the process of energizing the city of Cupertino, California. Since we have deep roots into the local community here, we thought this would be a good way to test our product in Cupertino in preview mode. To our delight, there seem to be more use-cases than we could imagine, here are some of the active communities we have seen form in Cupertino on fatdoor:
· Cupertino Block watch: Users have created block watch groups and signing-up their neighbors.
· Members of Veteran’s memorial at Cupertino Memorial Park: Users have created this group on fatdoor and are in the process recruiting funds for this effort to recognize soldiers from Cupertino/Sunnyvale who have died in the Iraq War.
· Political activism and fundraising: A few candidates are already recruiting new supporters and identifying lawn sign volunteer homes through fatdoor. In a couple of weeks, we expect to see all of the candidates for the 2007 Cupertino city council elections will have a community group on fatdoor.
It’s exciting to see that the Cupertino community is already fully engaged with fatdoor and finding new ways to connect with the next door neighbors! Look for our national launch – coming soon! “
would be very nice if could have a look at http://www.townkings.com – we´re working on this project since 16 month. it´s quite similar ;)
Best,
Philipp
townkings
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[...] The Local Onliner previewed FatDoor today… sounds interesting. The startup crawls the Web for publicly available info (College, job, kids, church, clubs, blogs) and is being designed to provide neighbors with publicly available info about each other so they can establish commonalities from the getgo, rather than sitting in the isolated silos of today’s typical “Bowling Alone” neighborhood. [...]
[...] FatDoor: LinkedIn + Zillow + Virtual Earth? Peter Krasilovsky has a somewhat speculative write up of new local site FatDoor, which mysteriously sponsored at the Kelsey Group’s recent conference (’cause they apparently wouldn’t talk about what they were doing). It appears to be a mix of real estate and virtual community and people search. And now the perfunctory biz model question . . . but it may be positioning itself as an online community with local ads/advertisers to come. [...]
[...] Peter Krasilovsky has a somewhat speculative write up of new local site FatDoor, which mysteriously sponsored at the Kelsey Group’s recent conference (’cause they apparently wouldn’t talk about what they were doing). [...]
[...] April 17th, 2007 from The Local Onliner [...]
[...] While the aims are commendable exposing your exact location online (even to your immediate community) will raise some serious safety issues. Site founder Raj Abhyanker answered some of these concerns here. We also imagine those concerned with digital information and privacy will be turned off at the thought of the web crawlers finding publicly available info on you online and highlighting to your neighbours - you may want to be friendly but keep your hobbies firmly behind the net curtains… [...]
[...] the well-funded social network based on the privacy-cringing aspects of crawling neighbor information, is going to remain “social” but is likely to change [...]