TOT: Streetlife.com?

[Roger Mills]

Received a letter the other day from some mob called streetlife.com - inviting me to join the online community for my village. It claims that it enables useful information to be shared locally - like recommendations for good tradesmen, or asking for help and advice generally, or helping to find lost pets, etc.

Has anyone come across this elsewhere? Is it worthwhile? Or is it just another Facebook clone to be avoided like the plague?

It's apparently free to join. Anyone know how it's funded? Will I get bombarded with adverts if I join?

[sm_jamieson]

I got something about that. It was for an area "sort of" neighbouring my area. It gave the impression of being a local website, but perhaps its an new attempt at a social networking site that can be sold in X years for Y million pounds. I've not bother investigating ... Simon.

[Davey]

Put it into your favourite search engine, there's lots about it. It looks to me like a version of Facebook, which means I will certainly not be joining it.

[Robin]

They charge for some entries/ads. But, like so many such sites, it's venture capital funding now (from Archant and others) with a view to income from local advertising down the track. (C/f the Zen-like simplicity of Google when it launched.) Focus is (was?) on urban areas where there's bugger all sense of "community".

Not yet. They email a daily link with "Here's what your neighbours are talking about..." Round here many are poorly concealed ads by businesses and the odd escapee from Freecycle but nicer areas may have a nicer class of neighbour - or nicer class of scam :)

And they don't police registration so a false name and throwaway email address work OK

[Mr Pounder]

No scammers here yet. Mainly idle gossip, people moaning about dustbinmen, ads by decorators etc. Oh, a few warnings about scammers and the odd request for computer help. It seems harmless.

[Harry Bloomfield]

Mr Pounder formulated on Friday :

Seems harmless to me too - It is a rather poor interface though, when compared to a proper forum.

[Harry Bloomfield]

Harry Bloomfield presented the following explanation :

One really daft thing it allows, is multiple people to sign up with identical user names, so was that something I wrote, or the guy in the next street, or maybe it was written by the guy with the same username in the next village. A very amateur mistake to allow that.

[Paul Herber]

I've found it very useful, no advert bombardment at all.

[Brian Gaff]

Its probably a data mining thing. I have no issues with that, but I do feel that people should be told before they get involved. I keep pointing out that in the old days of Prestel, it cost a lot of dosh to browse online serviceses with pages costing 99 p a time, so now we have free stuff, people still have to be paid, and hence the users are seen as a resource. Brian

[ARW]

Any info on who the milkman has shagged?

[Mr Pounder]

This is not Doncaster!!!!!!

[Mr Pounder]

Just the odd "Joiner available".