Google was born more than two decades ago as a young startup, as did Amazon and Facebook. But nowadays it is a big deal for other companies whenever they think they have a useful idea or they can be risky.
This is what Google did in June 2018, purchased by a company called Neighborly that is designed to ask and answer questions in a downtown setting. The idea was to deliver hyperlocal to cell phones.
This is one of the promises of social networking a few years ago, but it seems we are moving away from the public to more closed nuclei, such as WhatsApp chats.
Google closes Neighbors
The idea behind this app was to know a lot about our neighbors' appreciation for certain profiles that were classified as professionals.
It looks like the idea didn't work properly because it's a company of Street View has announced that it is closing the service, which was only available in India. It was e-mailed to its users, which read like this:
We introduced Neighborhood as a Beta app to interact with your neighbors and make sharing and location information more interactive and useful. As a community, you got together to celebrate local celebrations, share important details during the floods, and answer over a million questions … But Neighborhood hasn't grown as much as we expected. In these difficult times, we believe we can help more people by focusing on other Google apps that already work for millions of people every day.
It seems like the idea of social networking sites was not successful, at least on Google. We'll see if there are other apps that manage to make this idea a big deal, something that would be useful in times when incarceration spreads at the same speed as the virus itself.
Maybe in a few months the company will be able to get the key to make this kind of social networking or information relevant and useful.
