Mediaboss Marketing

A new social networking app is designed to help people build stronger local communities and become better neighbors.

If you want to borrow a cup of sugar, ask a neighbor if your children can get their ball back from their yard, or simply draw the immediate community's attention to a local news story, Huud is launching a social networking app that will let you do just that and more. Billed as the first location-based social network app designed specifically for bringing local communities closer together, Huud launched this week as a free app in the UK for both Android and iPhone.

Its makers claim it will help users to collaborate, network and socialize with their local community on the go by posting or browsing topics about their neighborhood and creating interest-specific groups. Users can also share local news instantly, offer and receive services on a local marketplace, ask neighbors for help, arrange events and ask for recommendations. In other words, build stronger, and hopefully better, local communities to create real rather than virtual connections, based on technology that has been used to build relationships between individuals living on opposite sides of the globe.

In October 2011, Nextdoor, a private social network for local communities launched in the US and, though it was derided at the time as yet another' social network, a year on it boasts users in every US state and claims to have brought 55,000 neighborhoods closer together. Huud clearly hopes that it can replicate that success on the other side of the Atlantic.

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Can an app really build better neighborhoods?