fatdoor
19 April 2007
FatDoor Crawls the Web for Neighbor Info
April 17th, 2007 from The Local Onliner
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.
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