Neighbourly: Google's answer to Facebook, WhatsApp in India
Google's latest, tailor-made app for India, Neighbourly, is part of the tech giant's latest attempt to be the go-to platform in India, taking on rivals such as Facebook and WhatsApp. Google's approach is quite different, and I feel it's a considerately-made, utilitarian platform, given the excesses of social media today. Neighbourly is a hyper-local, questions and answers app, which lets local expertise be shared.
What Neighbourly is essentially about
In essence, Neighbourly, is a crowdsourced, questions and answers app, with great privacy features, where people in neighborhoods can collectively create a hyper-local guide with tips, shortcuts, recommendations, events etc. Users will be able to post, answer, and follow questions on Neighbourly, and there's a feedback system wherein people rate answers. The most reliable answers to questions appear on top.
Neighbourly has robust privacy features
In a bid to prevent online harassment and stalking, Google has considerately built in robust privacy features. On signing up, users take an oath to keep the community safe. Neighbourly only shows first names; other information is kept private, and profile photos cannot be enlarged or saved. Notably, the app doesn't have a direct messaging feature, and only questions can be followed, not users.
Google spent two years building and refining the app
According to Business Standard, Google researchers spent two years roaming college campuses, neighborhoods, and people's living rooms to build and refine the app. They, obviously found pretty recurrent themes in major cities, wherein neighborhood networks have broken down, and the constant inflow and outflow of people, coupled with little time for neighborhood socialization, meant people in a lot of neighborhoods hardly knew anyone.
Neighbourly is yet to launch officially
Neighbourly, for now, is currently available only in Mumbai, and the official launch is yet to be announced. However, it's expected to be launched fairly soon since Google has already released a test version on PlayStore.
How Google actively took feedback to refine the app
After creating a beta version, Google testers walked door to door asking Indians to install the app, and then returned later, sat in with the users in living rooms and other spaces to take in-depth feedback for refinement. For instance, when women said they wouldn't want strangers to store their photos, Google decided to remove enlarge and storage features for profile photos.
So far, Neighbourly supports eight Indian languages, apart from English
Neighbourly also uses insights Google gains from the half a billion Indian smartphone users who use Search and Assistant. Owing to a third of searches being voice-activated in India, Neighbourly lets people ask questions in eight Indian languages so far, thereby making it accessible to people regardless of their social strata. And Google has made it clear that Neighbourly will strictly be for Q&A.
Google is eyeing India's half-a-billion plus online population
Having already launched payments platform Google Tez, and having added support for eight Indian languages on Google Assistant, the tech giant is eyeing India's growing online population, as a part of its aggressive global expansion. Last year, Google invested a few million dollars in Indian e-commerce platform Fynd, for a toehold in the shopping segment. Google is now refining social, and messaging functions.
