Yahoo! Neighbors

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

~ the obituary ~

Sacramento and San Carlos, California got it first, in November 2007. Yahoo! Neighbors began as a Hack Day project by a product manager on the Yahoo Local team and turned into a discussion board bolted onto local search results. You picked your town and read what the people in it were arguing about. The ambition was stated plainly enough that Archive Team's page still repeats it as a single sentence: a message board for every town in the USA.

After the two California test markets it reached the rest of the Bay Area and three more metros before going national. Nothing it was competing with existed yet. Nextdoor would not launch until October 2011, four years later, and EveryBlock was still a Knight News Challenge project when Yahoo was running giveaways to get people posting in Sunnyvale.

~ the case file ~

~ seeding parties ~

On 23 October 2008 Yahoo held an event in a back dining room at its Sunnyvale headquarters and gave away an iPhone to get people signed up. The listing names 19 Bay Area communities being seeded at the same time, San Jose and Palo Alto among them, and it borrows the pitch straight off the product's own front page: a practical discussion board for any topic, from neighborhood safety to contractor recommendations. One line of that copy has aged better than the rest of it. Get answers to questions you haven't thought to ask from neighbors you haven't met.

The front page sold the idea with cartoon speech bubbles down the right-hand side, each one a question somebody might plausibly post. Why doesn't our town have its own farmers market. In desperate need of a good contractor, can anybody help. That second one is the business case Nextdoor was later built on, sitting on a Yahoo page with nobody underneath it to answer.

The giveaways existed because a board for a town of thirty thousand people needs several hundred of them showing up in the same month or it reads as abandoned. Yahoo had enough traffic to try the whole country at once and worked zip code by zip code instead, which took years and still left most towns with an empty page.

~ the core products memo ~

The closure notice went up inside the module and it is four sentences long. "Thank you for using the 'Neighbors' module in Yahoo! Local. To help focus our efforts on core Yahoo! product experiences, we will discontinue the 'Neighbors' module by Monday July 8, 2013." A note dated 28 June pointed people at Yahoo Local Search to find out what was going on in their neighborhood, which is a search box rather than a conversation.

Marissa Mayer had been chief executive for a year by then and the core-products line was turning up on a lot of Yahoo tombstones that season. Neighbors was older than the iPhone's App Store, and it died five months after NBC switched off EveryBlock in February 2013. Two of the biggest companies that had tried hyperlocal gave up on it inside the same half-year.

~ nothing like it here ~

Turkey never had this and I am not sure the shape could have landed. The forums I was on in that window were national and sorted by subject, donanimhaber for hardware and frmtr for most other things. The local layer of my internet was an internet cafe two streets away, not a web page about my mahalle. Whatever Yahoo was packaging as neighborhood safety and contractor recommendations, I was getting from people on the street outside without logging into anything.

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