Just received a message in the last few days from Raj Abhyanker, co-founder of FatDoor. He informs me that they just launched their alpha site at the Ignite session at the Where 2.0 conference in San Jose, California. FatDoor is a new hyperlocal web site focused on discovering who and what’s in your neighborhood.

Highlights:

• Comes pre-loaded with residential and business data (based on zip code), mashed-up with Microsoft Virtual Earth
• You can claim your name and position your avatar on your house
• You can see your various neighbors and their interest via tags but it does not show their address or their phone number for privacy reasons
• You can contact your neighbors
• You can modify people’s profile (images, text) a la wiki
• You can create and join interest groups
• You can see deals and merchant reviews in your neighborhood (crawled content)
• You can see events in your neighborhood
• There is also a point system linked to the contributions you do

What it means: I like the effort as it is visually very beautiful but I’m not sure I completely get it. Although I’m a big fan of hyperlocal, I’m not sure tackling it from the residential side first will allow for more traction. Many people might be frightened to open up to their neighbors about their likes, association, and where they live. In any case, anyone running a residential search site should take a look at it. There are some interesting concepts in there.