More than “hyper-local,” LifeAt seeks to provide social networks and community tools for individual apartment buildings, condos and residential complexes. TechCrunch alerted me to the site. There are others taking this approach as well.
And the idea of getting to know your neighbors is something that Fatdoor has sought to help people accomplish, although I haven’t seen any movement on that front in some time.
One could imagine LifeAt succeeding at scale both for users and advertisers: super-local communities with demographic targeting too. One could imagine that building residents might be more trusted than more anonymous sources in terms of reviews and recommendations.
But getting into all those buildings (absent some centralized property management co. deals), getting users to participate and getting to scale is the challenge — a major challenge.
Screenwerk 
October 17, 2007 at 8:33 pm
I actually think this could work for apartments and neighborhoods. Building closer nit communities has a lot of advantages. My wife will just have to make a lot more cookies to hand out during the holidays.
In terms of getting one’s neighbors to participate, I think you have to go 100% offline. Chat with the folks you know, greet folks while they walk their dogs, any way to meet folks face-to-face. Ask them what they like/dislike about the neighborhood. Then you can create a flyer that focuses on those needs in order to attract folks to the site and signup for a newsletter.
October 22, 2007 at 1:07 pm
[…] covers LifeAt (and a couple of similar services) in his NY Times column today. Here’s my post from last week about the site: One could imagine LifeAt succeeding at scale both for users and […]