“It’s amazing how much more you can get done when you bring development in house,” says Bruce Good, the co-founder of South Africa’s homegrown social network for neighbours, OurHood.

I’m catching up with Good and his colleague and co-founder William Mellor following a busy year for the company. Launched as a way of allowing community groups to communicate and organise in a more secure manner than on Facebook or WhatsApp, the number of suburbs using the website hit 1 000 in September last year. A new version of the mobile app was released for this week.

While rapid growth was pleasing to see, says Good, it did bring with it certain problems. Most significant were issues around ease of use and missing features from the app itself. New sign-ups have been somewhat slower since: today the number of communities registered for OurHood is around 1 250.

The slowdown in growth is partly due to an easing off of marketing efforts on behalf of Good and his team, who wanted to implement improvements before beginning another big push for signups. One thing that stood out was that communities on the platform wanted to use the mobile app, which simply wasn’t as well polished as the website. While the site was functional it was the app that people most wanted to use, Good says, but relying on external developers meant the company couldn’t make changes as quickly as it wanted.

Hence his current eulogising for internal teams, who are more focussed and committed than a partner can be. It’s a sentiment that was echoed by one of SA’s best known entrepreneurs Vinnie Lingham recently.

Critically, the new mobile app includes two things sorely lacking from previous builds. The first is push notifications: with this turned on, users will get updates when something happens or news is posted for their suburb. To my mind, this solves the main problem with OurHood as it was – unless you checked in regularly, you were going to miss something or simply forget that it existed.

The second, more technical but also important, new feature is an API for plugging in different services. So third information – Twitter, for example – can be pulled straight into your community newsfeed.

OurHood has ambitions to be many things. At its core it is a way for residents’ associations to communicate safely and efficiently. It’s unique selling point is an “invite only” membership mechanism, which is designed so that only people who live in a community can see what is discussed there. Many, if not most, residential associations use Facebook or WhatsApp for organising because they’re simple tools that their members are already using. Each is inherently flawed for sensitive local information, argues Good. Facebook is too open, allowing anyone to see if you’re asking for a housesitter on the channel and thus are likely to be going away, for example. WhatsApp groups are hard to manage once there’s more than a few members, and verifying phone numbers is an arduous task.

OurHood’s mechanism for solving that is simple: only existing residents can invite new ones, and everyone can see each other’s profiles so strangers can be weeded out or emmigrants from an area removed swiftly. When trying to win people from Facebook or WhatsApp, however, a new platform has to offer benefits worth the inconvenience of signing up for something new.

Firewall to garden wall

OurHood certainly has those: it has features built-in specifically for the benefit of households. Like crime alerts for the area, classifieds and more. Local firms can buy advertising space to target offers to nearby residents and the OurHood team have been working on new ways to aggregate specific content and bring others on board.

The process of signing newcomers up is easier now too, and the next iteration of the app will include the ability to make subgroups that span multiple suburbs – a dogwalking group for a wider geographical area than your own postcode, for example.

Most significant is that in its newly overhauled mobile app there’s now a API supporting third party services making it much easier to aggregate content from other sources and allow local councils and public bodies like the police to push stories geographically – something that they can’t do on other platforms.

The City of Cape Town, for example, is piloting a program in Atlantis through which part of its Twitter feed is repurposed into the OurHood app. The theory being that Tweets are easy to miss in the Twitter firehose, but information directly relevant to an area – like traffic lights out or water problems – can be sent to those who actually need them.

“We are always looking for ways to effectively engage citizens and whilst we continue to push messages out on our platforms we realise that citizens don’t just want to have a conversation with us about what we think is important to them, but also want to connect with their neighbours about what is meaningful to them,” explains the municipality’s Daniel Sullivan, “Through the OurHood pilot in Atlantis, we hope to see citizens engaging with each other and accessing relevant City information so that awareness can be raised about local issues which can be addressed at a local level”

While the app-centric new focus of OurHood might suggest that it’s a tool for the smartphone-wielding middle classes, we’ve written before that it was actually born out of a project in the township of Gugulethu. Good says that its still being adopted in poorer areas: Mitchells Plain has seen one of the fastest adoption rates in the country, for example, where local police are included in chat groups to monitor for alerts.

“OurHood makes it easier for us in Mitchells Plain to convey messages whether it be in terms of safety awareness or just selling products,” says resident Garth Prins, “I sent a message once about suspicious activity and when I looked again the police were on the scene.”

And this, says Good, is where the future of OurHood lies. As a platform for all things “hyperlocal” through which you can receive news updates, classified adds and interact with local services too. There’s opportunities to make use of data published under the Open Government Partnership Action Plan and other open data initiatives make it relevant for citizens, he says, and the next major event for the company will be the local elections. Good says he’s talking to everyone including the Independent Electoral Commission to find out how the app can be useful in helping residents to access information regarding their vote.

Will it be enough to woo community groups away from Facebook? We’ll just have to wait and see.