Why NeighborYou: A Social Mission
It feels crazy spending an entire week sifting through my college’s website for events and handing out Rita’s Ice to freshmen by a bustling crosswalk. But that’s exactly what I just did, and I could not be more excited for what’s to come.
After finishing up my second co-op at a major tech company, I’m back to the college campus life. After 14 months in the real world, I’m no longer satisfied with my weekly achievements of acing an exam and successfully organizing an event for some of the student orgs with which I work.
My satisfaction in life comes from creating things. It’s why I’m an engineer and it’s why I’m so passionate about what I do. My joy is not a derivative of learning some computer science algorithm or mathematical law — it is from applying these things to tread waters where no one has been.
For me, those waters are events. In an age where you can summon a car with a stranger in minutes or download knowledge handed down from thousands of years in seconds, you still have to scan through Google Calendars and poorly-designed websites for hours to figure out even a fraction of things happening around you. Even then, you’re not going to find the frisbee game on the green or the amazing street performer a few blocks down. The only real way to discover these kinds of things is by word-of-mouth or the occasional relevant Facebook post, buried among ads, vacation photos, and Trump articles.
This is what made me decide that NeighborYou needs to happen.
Why not create a central hub with everything going on right now? I don’t care about the party happening in three days or the festival next week; I care about right now. What I really need is a living map that dynamically changes with time.
This is what NeighborYou is.
Pins on the map show everything going on right now. Events are derived from two sources: organizations and individuals. We want to empower organizations and allow them to share their events with students on campus. We do this by letting them seed events in advance. Because these are almost guaranteed to occur, events are scheduled and shown to the user 15 minutes before they start (our launch campus is geographically small — no place should be more than a 15 minute walk away).
Even more important is our democratization of the neighborhood. We don’t want to be another EventBrite or SF Funcheap and simply post the largest events going on. The power of creating and sharing events should be in the hands of everyone. Whether it’s meet-ups, parties, study groups, or sports events, there should be an easy way to find them.
Since first pitching this, the questions keep flowing. How do you ensure that the event is actually happening? How do you prevent the map from being filled with useless information?
We’ve thought carefully about each of these. After creating an event, you must be checked in at the spot within 20 minutes of creating it. If within an hour, you do not have another friend checked in, the event is removed from the map. After four hours, you will need 5 friends or more checked in each consecutive hour to ensure the event stays alive (almost all events are over within four hours). This keeps you from showing up at something that nobody is actually attending.
Events are ranked based on popularity. The more people who check in, the further up the queue the event moves. Think Reddit for the real world.
We’re excited about the technology we’ve built — but we’re most excited about the power this has for bringing people together. We’ve seen the power of apps like Pokemon Go to bring people into the real world and spend time with total strangers. Instead of staring at phones to catch virtual creatures, we should bring people together to have new experiences and share the world around them.
The idea that technology detaches us from one another is a fallacy based on a few of today’s popular services. Technology has the power to bring people together and bring forth social experiences that would otherwise be impossible. People are naturally socially beings, and we’re convinced that we have the tool to help them be just this.
