Nearbie: social bookmarking for real life

Nearbie is a new social bookmarking service that lets users broadcast status updates, and keep tabs on friends. Nearbie goes one step further than some other sites that do this (see Dodgeball, Groovr and Jaiku) to show you how user-submitted material is connected to people or places in your geographical location. Users can submit all sorts of things such as event notices, local landmarks, personal stories, and pictures. It's a lot like a blog, but with far more structure. The hope is that when enough people begin to use the service, users will be able to discover more about people they've met or places they've been.

Adding new content to Nearbie requires users to log in and go through a four-step process telling others the who, the when, the where, and the what. Each of the steps lets you add specific tagging information such as the geographical location, who else was there, or when exactly it happened. Think of it as a police report, but for blogging purposes. When you've submitted your "post", it shows up on the front page of Nearbie and is grouped with other posts for similarities in time, place, or people.

What interests me is whether or not people will be willing to input data about their lives into another Social Network. Sites such as Facebookalready have a hassle-free way to keep tabs on friends with their controversial news feed, the service that automatically publishes everything about everyone, given the right privacy settings. Nearbie seems to be shooting for something similar but requires a little more work on the user end that, frankly, I don't think people are willing to go through.

See Mashable's review for an alternate take.