Shhh… just quietly, we launched Neighbo today! After two years of messing around, our little search engine for Melbourne is open to the public. We’ve published real, verified information for 1,300 places around Brunswick and Brunswick East, and we’ll follow up soon with more places and more features.
Check it out now at https://neighbo.au/
This is just the start for Neighbo. What we are publishing today is barely a fraction of what we want to do, and so we have a big list of features that we’ll be adding to Neighbo soon. That includes:
- Local events, such as live music gigs, markets, kids’ activities, and classes for adults.
- Good maps, so we can show you all the great things to do for free around Brunswick.
- Community contributions, so we can get your business or event onto Neighbo quickly.
- Mobile apps for Android and iOS.
I was going to tell you more but, fortunately for you, I caught myself writing a rather long-winded and perhaps self-indulgent blog post, and so I cut all that out. Instead, I want to give you just one message: No AI Slop.
The more I have worked on Neighbo, the more apparent it is that AI slop is crowding out what is real. The places we used to turn to for information aren’t as reliable any more. So we have decided to take a hard stance on AI slop at Neighbo, disallowing any AI-generated text or images. We’re doing something different: walking through Brunswick, checking what is really out there, talking to people and business owners, and building connections into our community. These are the things an AI model running in an overseas data centre will never be able to do.
So tell me what you think; please do get in touch and give me your feedback and suggestions. We are, after all, actual humans at Neighbo.