The apps that connect you with your neighbors. I'm rich jamiro This is Rich on Tech daily. Between high speed internet and Wi Fi cameras, our homes are better connected than ever, But what about our neighborhoods. Sure Facebook is great for connecting us to all the people we know, but think about the homes in your neighborhood. You probably know your neighbors to the left and to the right, maybe the person across the street, but go down a
few houses, you probably don't know them. Or maybe over a few streets that's still your neighborhood, but you don't really know those people.
Well, there's a whole bunch of.
Apps that can connect you with the folks in your neighborhood for lots of reasons. Number one is crime, but there's many other uses of these apps, including if you want to get a recommendation for a service provider.
That's a good use, or maybe you just want to sell your stuff.
How easy is it for someone down the street to just collect an old bed that you have or a sofa? First off, let's start with nextdoor. This is a social network for your neighborhood. So maybe you've gotten an invitation for it maybe you're already on there, or maybe you don't use it that much even though you have an account. This one could be really handy, and this is probably like one of the best use case scenarios of the Internet, because the deal is it's connecting you to people that
are nearby. These are the people that are in your neighborhood. They're day in, day out seeing what's going on. And it's good to chat with these people because you know, you're exchanging information like back in the old days, except now it's all online. So when you make a post, you can make it seen by just like your immediate neighborhood, or you can expand it out to include other neighborhoods
around you. And the categories they have that are pretty popular include recommendations, So these are things like, hey, I had this plumber, he was great, use them for your house items, for sale events, so anything locally that's happening, and of course crime. When we talk to the company, they said they work with a bunch of agencies like local and official agencies, so they post a lot of stuff to the neighborhoods as well. So if you're on these for any reason at all, if you want to
get into your community or more involved. This is a great way to do just that. Now, I see a lot of crime posts on here, so it's a lot of that stuff. And it's a lot of kind of things like Hey, did you just hear that sound down the street?
Or why is there a helicopter flying over our neighborhood? So it's a lot of that stuff. It's kind of like a real time conversation with your neighbors.
Next Door says they do their best to verify that people live in the neighborhood that they sign up for, and they do that in several ways. First off, you can get a referral from someone that lives in the neighborhood that's already signed up. They might mail you a postcard, they might do a phone call, but either way, they want you to use your real name when possible, and they also want you to list as much of your address as possible, so at least at the very least.
It will say your name and your street.
Some people even opt to put their exact house number on there as well. The company says they do this because by using the real name and a verified address, they think it helps people become a little bit better than all the anonymous stuff that's out there on the internet. So nextdoor dot com that's the first one. Now let's talk about a new future from Ring. And I was just taking a walk in my neighborhood yesterday and I can't believe how many people have these Ring video doorbells.
Actually I can because I'm a big fan of them. I think they're really cool and they're everywhere. So now Ring has a new feature in their app. It's called Ring Safe Neighborhoods, and what they do is they actually let you share the videos that you're collecting with these Ring video doorbells, so you can share a little snippet of a clip to this sort of social network that's inside the app.
You can also create text.
Posts as well, but a lot of people use this to share their videos and also screenshots from the videos of things happening, basically crimes happening in their neighborhood or even weird stuff. You know, we see a lot of things happen on these cameras nowadays, so people are just sharing anything that's interesting. When we talk to Ring, they say their mission is to reduce crime in neighborhoods and they've done that.
With products like their video doorbell.
They also have these really cool floodlight cams as they're called, and these are really neat because it's a floodlight. So if you already have the wiring for a floodlight on the side of your house, well, you can easily connect the Ring floodlight cam and now you have floodlights with a video cam as well. So that's an easy way to get the security of a camera without adding a
bunch of wires to your house. The ney thing about the Ring Neighborhoods app is that you don't have to have a Ring product to use it, so you can actually just sign up for the app and you can set your neighborhood and set a radius around your home and then you can see the videos that people are sharing nearby.
Ring CEO and founder Jamie Simmonov, a very nice guy by the way, says it's a positive.
Way for neighbors to come together around something that really matters, which is making neighborhoods safer. And by the way, right after we recorded our interview with Jamie, the news broke a couple days later that Amazon purchased Ring for like a reported one billion dollars, so expect to see many more ring video doorbells in your neighborhood in the near future.
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Thanks so much for listening. I'm Rich Damiro. I'll talk to you real soon.