• by Kathleen Burge , August 31, 2007

One of the first local social networking sites was i-neighbors.org, launched in 2004 as part of an MIT research project and now existing in more than 3,000 communities around the United States and Canada. Keith Hampton, an assistant professor at the Annenberg School for Communication at the University of Pennsylvania, created i-neighbors as part of his research on how online social networking changes the real-world relationships of neighbors.

The sociologist found that the youngest, most tech-savvy people who participated in his study — a group of mostly single residents of a downtown Boston apartment building — had the least interest in i-neighbors. Hardly any of them bothered to send a single message during the life-span of Hampton’s experiment.

But in the right setting, Hampton found, Internet technologies may help people connect with their neighbors and expose them to a more diverse group of people. Hampton, whose research will be published this fall, found that those who actively participated in the project — those who sent e-mails, not lurkers — experienced an average increase of four “neighborhood ties” in each year of the study.

Sociologists have long been interested in the way technology has changed interaction in neighborhoods, once the bedrock of people’s social lives, but disrupted over time by modern technology such as the telephone and the automobile.

And so when the Web was born, and people began decrying the Internet as yet another enemy of social interaction, Hampton was curious to see whether cyberspace could bring people together — people who might live just a few feet from each other or drive past each other on the street every day but who had never met. At the time, he was teaching at MIT and he chose three neighborhoods in the Boston area, one of which was Follen Hill, a subdivision in Lexington.

Hampton created an e-mail list for the neighborhood, and a Web site that included a community calendar, a forum to rate local businesses and post classified ads, user profiles and an instant messenger, showing which neighbors were online. The project really took off in Lexington. The median annual income of the area, according to the 2000 U.S. Census, was $94,000 per household. Two-thirds of the residents had at least a bachelor's degree; half had children under the age of 18 at home. And 70 percent of them had not moved in the past five years.

One day this summer, Mary Dean, a member of i-neighbors, was gardening outside her Lexington house when a neighbor stopped by her yard. Although the two lived a few hundred feet apart, they had never met. As they chatted about the neighborhood, the man mentioned that his wife occasionally mused that they should invite the new neighbors over.

After a few moments, Dean realized that she and her husband, who had moved there more than a decade ago, were the “new neighbors.” When one of Hampton’s researchers surveyed Dean in 2002 — seven years after she moved to Follen Hill — she didn’t know a single one of her neighbors. A few years into the project, she recognized 30 of her neighbors’ names.

It took the vast depths of cyberspace to introduce Dean, at least online, to some of the people who live around the corner. Consumers are slowly starting to turn to the Web to make local connections. Now entrepreneurs just have to figure out how to make that pay.

“Everyone wants to attack the local scene because it’s such a rich opportunity,” Sterling says. “Everybody lives in the real world.”