Inhabit Street: Instant Community for Those Who Live in Boxes
I just got an email from an old colleague. He’s just launched Inhabit Street. Here’s the blurb:
for apartment buildings, condos and townhouses, inhabit street is a website for your community.
it’s a place for you to meet your neighbours, manage your strata and find out what’s going on in your neighbourhood..
Yes, I’m troubled by the lack of capitalization, too.
At our last apartment building, the building manager actually had set up a robust website with useful stuff like guest suite applications, policies and so forth. Additionally, he set up an old-school forum where people could talk about issues (Why do we have a beach volleyball court? Who keeps letting their dog poo in it?).
I do see a lot of potential competition for this kind of service. Sites like Facebook, obviously, as well as Ning. The trick will be delivering enough task-specific additional value that you wouldn’t get in a general purpose social network.
This is strictly my personal taste, but when I lived in a skyscraper I didn’t want to know my neighbours. I clung to the anonymity like a gecko. That’s still true in our five-suite heritage house here in Victoria, but trickier to execute.
