After being tested in four local markets, Yahoo slowly rolled out its new service, Yahoo Neighbors. Currently available only for ten big city markets, the service is expected by all Internet experts to quickly build a huge online community thanks to its usefulness and great idea behind it. It is available in: Dallas, Houston, Washington, Chicago, New York, Miami, Los Angeles, Atlanta, Boston and Philadelphia. // Update and correction: As Michael Olivier, Sr. Engineering Manager for Yahoo pointed out in the first comment, the launch is covering the entire US.
As a mash-up between Yahoo Answers and local forums, this new service incorporated in the Yahoo Local website is bound to make a huge splash, at least thanks to its Yahoo Answers inherited SEO that will surely rank it very high on major search engines.
Yahoo Neighbors wants simply to be a place were local communities meet and ask / answer questions about specific local topics. Let's say you are searching for a good electronics store in Miami. Just ask a question, and people from Miami inside that group will answer it for you.
The service provides great RSS availability, since every city, community, category and even topic has its own RSS feed for those avid to continuously stay in touch. Topics can also be sorted by “Most Recent” or “Most Active.”
The site implements good spam policy, with incorporated abuse reporting buttons and admin moderation over topics. Yahoo Neighbors also has a flyer that users can download and spread through the neighborhood to help promote the website. Maybe a Twitter and Facebook implementation would have been better, but who are we to judge.
Viewed as a good implementation of Yahoo Answers for local business communities, the site is bound to have success capitalizing on Yahoo's biggest asset, its HUGE user database. Just imagine how many members this service will gain with just a simple official email from the Yahoo team to its users.
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