I wonder how this compares to an app like YikYak. I checked out YikYak for a few days (really a weird feeling with a bunch of random anonymous people posting messages). This seems similar except maybe only one-to-one rather than message thread based? Also YikYak seems to have about 5 mile radius zones (8km) rather than 1km.
I haven't used Zone but I know YikYak caught on pretty hard with college aged folk and college campuses, so the discussions and posts tend to be a bit different. I worked at a University in tech and due to the harassment issues with YikYak was told to keep an eye on it and determine if we need to request a Geo-Block from the YikYak team.
I would imagine Zone can probably break free of the age association and maybe grab people with the same sort of "town bulletin board" feel, but it's going to have a lot of conflicting user bases, and probably lots of trouble with harassment in local areas. YikYak had tons of issues with the harassment [0] problem until the user base took on a much more serious approach to moderating. The few times I was told by a student that there was something bad on YikYak, it had already been moderated out of visibility.
I don't know how Zone's posting works or if it has moderation or not, but hopefully the user base takes a similar approach.
[0] To expand on the harassment, it wasn't just nasty messages being written, it was stalker-ish comments tracking individual's activities, threats against persons, calls for vandalism, and so on. On a smaller University campus, it's taken a lot more seriously. We also had issues with student workers abusing access privileges and leaking private information to YikYak, which was dealt with appropriately by the administration.
