Streetlife

» see streetlife.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the goodbye ~

streetlife was a british product. the kind of consumer-web service the uk built in the early 2010s for its own neighborhood density, with the assumption that someone on the next street might want to borrow a drill or warn you about a parked van. that assumption did not export cleanly to turkey. our apartment-block dynamics ran through the kapıcı and the building whatsapp group ten years later, not through a website you signed up to with your postcode.

matt boyes started the project in 2008 after his brother-in-law's london flat was burgled. the working name was streetbook. it took three years to ship and launched as streetlife.com on march 21, 2011, with a postcode-keyed signup that put you onto your own street feed plus the streets around it. the loop was lost-cat posts, builder recommendations, council complaints, found keys. for a window in the early 2010s the uk press treated it as the british answer to a category nextdoor was already locking down in the states.

by 2015 the company put member count at around a million across four thousand communities. the nextdoor press release at acquisition time updated that to 1.5 million. investors at the back of the cap table included archant, the regional newspaper group, alongside steve pankhurst from friends reunited doing his second act as a uk-social-network angel. the company had raised around 1.4 million pounds by 2013. enough to keep the lights on, not enough to lock the uk market against an american incumbent with venture money behind it.

~ the chronicle ~

~ how it landed ~

i did not see streetlife from the inside. it solved a problem that was specific to a country with a particular density and a particular set of social customs around the local pub plus the parish council. the rest of europe had its own versions of this category and most of them never crossed national borders either. streetlife sat in the layer of the british web that did not reach turkey at all (cant remember any reference to it from that period).

the cultural artifact this kind of platform produced was the small-scale neighborhood drama. lost dogs found within hours. a row about a fence that got out of hand and ran for forty replies. the british version had a particular tone, more apologetic than the american equivalent. that texture was visible on the open web at the time and has since moved into closed whatsapp and signal groups that are not legible from the outside.

~ the buyout ~

nextdoor announced the streetlife acquisition on february 5, 2017. the deal was reported as multi-million pounds but under ten million. employees did not transition over. the press release framed it as nextdoor entering the uk market through a member migration rather than an outright purchase of operations. members were given a ninety-day window to access their own posts plus private messages, then the site was switched off at the end of the month.

the migration itself was not clean. the streetlife user base had a different relationship to data sharing than nextdoor wanted. nextdoor's policy required real names plus exact addresses. streetlife had been looser. complaints about the migration showed up in the press for months afterward, with some former members refusing to sign up under the new terms. that was the cost of the absorbed-and-killed pattern. the brand vanished and the user base fragmented, with holdouts moving into facebook groups or back to nothing.

~ the long tail ~

streetlife is the british entry in a recurring pattern of national-scale community sites bought by their us competitor for cheap market entry. the equivalents in other countries followed the same arc through the 2010s. the bigger story is that the local-neighborhood social network as a standalone product never sustained itself anywhere. nextdoor's own profitability story remains complicated and the category as a whole has not produced a durable independent winner outside the us. anyway, the british layer of the open web is one chapter shorter without streetlife in it.

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