
Bulletin, from Google - handpickednames
https://posts.google.com/bulletin/share
======
diakritikal
So many services and organisations have gone after hyperlocal for the
perception of the ad-revenue that's just waiting to fall into their hands -
because if someone's reading about a car accident near their route home they
need an advert for the local carwash right?

Similarly if they are reading about some music gig coming up in the area they
need an ad or offer for 25% off burgers at hipster burger joint du-jour that
covers that night.

I once worked on a hyperlocal project that was funded by a television company
to actually curate a stream of interesting and novel content about the local
area. These were trained journalists curating sourced and self-created
content. If the content was good enough then there would be ad-revenue (and
deal placement) to follow, or so you would think. Turns out nobody was
interested at all.

I don't think user submitted content will be engaging enough, but we'll see. I
think anyone with a disposable income that could be targeted for hyperlocal
ads or deals doesn't have enough time to use this app as well as
twitter/facebook/whatever.

~~~
mikehollinger
Interestingly, NextDoor seems to be taking off in my area. The premise is that
the neighborhood has a mailing list or bulletin board for neighbors, by
neighbors. A bit of the feed contains events from community organizations like
the nearby police station soliciting feedback or park service having an open
house.

This might be a swing at services like that.

~~~
JustSomeNobody
I made a comment below asking if this was basically supposed to be like
Nextdoor. I do get the sense that this is the market they're going for.

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danso
> _Bulletin makes it effortless to put a spotlight on inspiring stories that
> aren’t being told...Effortless: No setup is required to create a story - all
> you need is a smartphone_

Speaking as a former newspaper journalist, not much about local journalism is
_effortless_. Even writing a glowing positive obit is a lot of stress -- make
a mistake and you'd hear about it from the dead person's loved ones for
awhile. A smartphone definitely helps with the mechanics of publication and
dissemination but I don't think that's generally the bottleneck from the
content-generator side. I'm interested in what mechanisms will be in place to
filter -- i.e. a "PageRank" for contributors. But given how difficult a
problem it has been to do this for YouTube, which is actually a cash cow for
Google, how many engineering resources will be devoted to a news app?

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jaredcwhite
"Open: Bulletin stories are public and easy to discover: on Google search,
through social networks, or via links sent by email and messaging apps"

I'm not a fan of Google these days by any stretch of the imagination, but if
they're sincere about making Bulletin content truly open and accessible via
the web and not stuck in a proprietary mobile app silo, then this could be a
good thing. The recent trend of large companies towards closing themselves off
from the open web is troubling, so any new content platform that makes
openness a priority is something to applaud.

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prepend
Is there a crypto hat lets you bet on when Goog will pull the plug on this new
service. I’d wager 1000 doge that this will stop taking new users in 18 months
and be offline in 36.

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amelius
This would all be nice ...

... if it wasn't for the hunger of Google for my personal information.

~~~
sureaboutthis
You mean just like your bank, your retail store, your ISP, your news outlet,
your car dealership, your ...

Google is no different and isn't doing anything new that hasn't been done for
decades; even hundreds of years.

~~~
amelius
I would have a problem with it if my bank, retail store, ISP, news outlet and
car dealership were all the same company.

The scale and connectivity of the data is the problem here. It's now possible
to draw conclusions from the combination of datasets.

~~~
sureaboutthis
Do not think that the scale and connectivity is different. All those
businesses sell your information and extract your information, too. In many,
possibly most, cases, they know more about you than Google does.

~~~
amelius
But in many countries that kind of sharing is not allowed without an "opt-in".

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gtirloni
It doesn't seem different from how, say, WhatsApp is used in some places to
spread "news".

The potential for abuse is big. What sort of curation will be done?

Right now, I can safely say that 90% of everything I get in popular WhatsApp
groups is fraud, misinformation, fake news, baseless accusations, harmful
medicine advice, etc.

Maybe Bulletin will be exclusively focused on events and they'll have a better
time curating that.

~~~
vesak
If Bulletin shows hyperlocal "news" based on your actual location without the
need to join anything, then there's already added value compared to WhatsApp
et al.

As for moderation, could it be possible that they have an AI to weed out the
stupid?

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JustSomeNobody
So, is this a Google version of Nextdoor? Or a mashup of Twitter and Nextdoor?

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Shelnutt2
Previous discussion:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16240345](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16240345)

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icefox
Discontinued?

~~~
etu
Probably.

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sirtel
Its card style doesn't follow Material design.

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bringtheaction
Oh look another Google project that will last for a while and then they'll
pull the plug on it.

~~~
PurpleRamen
Looks like something they can integrate into Google Maps, once it's successful
enough. But because nobody will ever find it again there, it will be removed 3
Years later because of lacking usage.

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romanovcode
Looks like they are aiming at Instagram? Well. Good luck.

